when the manga pages themselves don't have numbers!!! i'm scanning in some pages, and if it did have numbers it'd be a lot easier to name them accordingly.

lol good question. It's for...uh...wasting a page's sake?? Actually, I think it's to tell you that "oh, there's also something at the end here...not just the main story."

I hate when the Mnaga has table of contents for chapter names, but no chapter numbers. When I get to the end of the American releases and I want to contunue by reading scans, I have to DL chapters in the approximate areas at random, or go through and count chapters by hand. Pain.

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Life is tough......but it's tougher if you're stupid.

Well, if the manga is a collection of oneshots,
then I am able to see if I actually even want to
read it.

This is not a problem only with Japanese manga. I've read an American release which had interesting notes at the end that referenced page numbers - but there were no (or very, very few) page numbers in the manga. Verrrry irritating (and yes, I did email the US publisher about it).

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"[English] not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
-James Nicoll, can.general, March 21, 1992

yeah, it's irritating, but it also irritates me when they dont list it at all when i'm scanslating and i'm like " I KNOW this entire volume is not one chapter.. where the hell does one end and the other begin" 'cause you know.. you dont want to cut it off too early or too late becasue then it gets sonfusing. >.> hell, i'll count the damn pages. just let me know!!

A chapter begins on the left side where the bottom third of it is filler space for the mangaka to write whatever they want. In the magazines it's used to write what's happened so far.

If all fails, then you can always read every page, and piece them together appropriately.

That feels a bit condescending, even though I'm sure it's not supposed to be.
But anyway, that's not true in all cases, and what you described is more often than not how you can tell in shoujo. I'll give a few examples of what has frustrated me in the series my group has done: between chapters 1 and 2 and 6 and 7 of Akkan Baby (hell, the majority of Akkan Baby), chapter 36 and 37 of Edens Bowy, and just plain trying to break up the chapters for the second story of Naked (I never would have thought there were chapters if it didn't list the issues they ran in along the side at the end).