>  You wouldn't believe how many counters there are in Japanese. By counter
> I mean the adjective used to specify the amount of something.
>
>  For example in English you say "two people", "two bottles", "two plates",
> "two cars", "two floors", etc.
>
>  In Japanese there are different counter adjectives depending on the thing
> being described. For example there are counter for round objects,
> cylindrical objects, people, flat objects, days... You name it. Almost
> everything has its own counters.

All those counter types mostly stem from two main sets, one for discrete 
items (like 2 cups, 3 beers) and one for measuring continuous things (4.2 
volts, 2 metres etc).  I think in Japanese they just join together the 
number word and some kind of "helper" word, like in English you would say 
"two cups of coffee", in Japanese they just join "two cups" together and 
make it one word.  Of course you then end up with 52513 different ways to 
say 1-10 :-)

If you are a foreigner, just remembering the two base sets is fine to get 
you by, it's perfectly acceptable and understandable to ask for "two coffee" 
instead of "twocup coffee", but you can't use the "two" that you use to 
measure things, you'll get a blank look for that.

>  Japanese has many other quirks too.

I like the fact that you don't need to conjugate the verbs depending on the 
subject of the sentence, also that there is no word for "the" or "a", and 
the best bit is no noun genders and mostly no plurals as you say.

> (Well, *technically* speaking there is a kind of future tense, but it's
> a bit awkward and seldom used. Usually there's no need, though. The 
> present
> tense doubles for future tense in most sentences, the actual tense being
> implied by the context or the meaning of the surrounding words.. It's
> surprisingly unambiguous.

Similar in German, it seems to me that the present tense is used for 
actually doing something at that moment, that you do something in general, 
or that you are going to do something in the future.  As you say, it just 
depends on the context.

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