There are three basic counters. Postpositions are suffixes that add grammatical functions to nouns. They are similar to prepositions in English, but the order of words are opposite, as the name implies. It is important to know that phrases which add information to a main phrase are always placed before the main phrase in Japanese. This is a consistent rule with no exception.
Linguists call it head-last .
English is a head-first language, where a main phrase is placed before additional phrases, but it is not so consistent as Japanese. But adjectives break the rule as they are placed before a main phrase. A white dog is a kind of dog, not a kind of whiteness. Anyway, the phrase means a kind of ear, because of the head-last rule. Now that you know , you can count things with counters.