To answer your questions; You might have missed something saying that 一人 has an special reading (I can’t remember whether that something exists or not). As far as I can tell, your not an idiot. Well, now you know. Things like that happen even when you follow the instructions. The rule is that the word 一人 just has that reading, it’s an exception (二人 has a special reading too, but from 三人 they follow the normal ’rules’).

EXACTLY!  He doesn’t even seem that serious about Textfugu, and the material he has covered so far is rather basic to be honest.  I would use Textfugu more if he actually had some committed updates and schedules, but he doesn’t.  Some people are really trying to learn Japanese, and they don’t have the time to waste waiting for new lessons and grammar, especially when they can just learn it somewhere else like TaeKim’s.

I’m a beginner too, but I’ll try to answer your question anyway (if any person more advanced than I am spots any mistake, please correct me!). It’s a special reading and I don’t think it would have been possible to know with the lesson. I think Koichi put it on the practice page to show that exceptions exist… maybe? Anyway, your “ichinin” would have been good if 一人 weren’t an exception, since 三人 (not an exception) is pronounced “sannin”.

Willy wrote:

So I looked and saw that “人” was “Hito” so assumed “一” would be the “ri”. But I can’t see that anywhere, with “一” I just see “ひと.つ”.

In Japanese, there are many “counters”, “nin” being one of them: to count people. Counters are basically something you put after a number to show what you are counting (the つ you saw in ひと.つ is for counting small objects, for example). When you assumed that 一 would be “ri”, it wasn’t correct. “ri” is actually another way of pronouncing 人, while “hito” is another way of pronouncing 一, as you can see in 一つ (hitotsu) for example.

If we look at 二人, we can see that it’s the same thing: it’s pronounced as “futari”, “futa” being 二 and “ri” being 人.

I hope this explanation helped you a bit and wasn’t too confusing >.<!

Different things have different counting words – for example, small animals use 匹 (ひき), birds use 羽 (わ), books use 冊 (さつ), flat things use 枚 (まい), long thin things use 本 (ほん), machines use 台 (だい), et cetera, et cetera. Generic “things” use the Japanese reading of numbers with つ. There’s a big list. Most of them have occasional exceptions – typically for four, six and eight, and occasionally three or ten. (Though they’re never so extreme as the exceptions for 人. Or 日. Boy, does 日 have exceptions.)

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counter_word

@David:  一つ is ひとつ with a weird ひ sound. It kind of sounds like a cat’s hiss to me. xP

I wouldn’t place too much faith in online recordings – microphone artefacts can make things sound a little off sometimes, and compression artefacts can’t help either.

That said, people who have commented on this in the past tend to hear “しとつ”…