To count things in Japanese, you cannot put nouns immediately after a number. Counters, which are added after numbers, are necessary. English also has some counters for uncountable nouns. For instance, you would say two cups of water, ten pieces of paper, and fifty head of cattle.
Japanese nouns resemble English uncountable nouns.
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.