人 – How to say Person and talk about People in Japanese

人ひと is the word for person in Japanese. It is not the only word though you can say to talk about people in Japanese. Depending on if you are talking about one person or several people you may use the same word, or a few different words. Also, Japanese has words that are more polite than others. So, learning to talk about people in Japanese is important. Let’s take a look at how to do so.

How do I say Person in Japanese?

人ひと is the word for person in Japanese. It is also how you say people in Japanese. The way nouns work in Japanese is different from English. Most English words have a singular and plural form. Japanese on the other hand has nouns that can be both singular or plural.

この人の名前なまえはジョンだ
This person‘s name is John

ここには人が少すくない
There are few people here

The context of the sentence will often tell you if the word is talking about one, or several people. Often though, it does not matter and you can get away without thinking about the number of people.

https://japaneseuniverse.com/2024/02/18/pac-man-in-japaneseconcepts-behind-development-to-global-icon/

What about when I need to be specific?

If you need to be specific about how many people you are talking about Japanese does have ways to help you do that. You can say one of the following words to mean multiple people:

• 人々ひとびと
• 人ひとたち

Both of these words mean people and refer to multiple people. If you have to pick one, 人たち is probably more common as 人々 may sound more formal. There is a slight difference though. 人たち sounds like you are talking about a specific group of people. Likely a group of a few different people but it could be lots of people 人々 on the other hand sounds more like an undefined number of people. 人々 also sounds like a bigger number of people than 人たち since it is talking about a people that are not specified.

Counting People

In Japanese also you can count people. There are words or one person, 一人ひとり, two people, 二人ふたり and so on.

How to Count People in Japanese

Counting people and using different words for the number of people is an important part of the Japanese language. You can read all about it in the post I wrote above.

Resources

• 人 – Weblio (Japanese)