What is this small katakana ke character that is used? I see it in a bunch of counters (ヶ月、#ヶ所 ). I just don't understand why especially this character. Anyone got an explanation for this?
Yes, it’s an abbreviation for a kanji character. As is 々. 々 just repeats the previous character, but ヶ always stands for the counter 箇 (which is interchangeable with 個 and 个).
If you look closely at 箇, you can see that the radical is two ヶs. That’s the bamboo radical 竹 in its reduced form, since originally this counter was used to count culms of bamboo.
As the post and other comments have said, it's literally just a shortening for a more complicated kanji. If you don't know about counters, please learn about those bc this will make a lot more sense.
So, as mentioned by the other person, the original kanji is relatively chunky and since its used in the counter for counting months, it's written very often. But, people don't like writing the tedious kanji usually used, so they basically just use ヶ as a shorthand.
Basically a side note, but if you're curious, the reason they used the ヶ Is because it's just the top symbol from the kanji. But (from my knowledge so far) this symbol is not used in any other circumstances that I know of. Maybe it's used in another counter for something, but it's basically just like an abbreviation for the kanji. If I wasn't clear, or misinformed, you can read about it in Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar, Section 4.16.
Anyways, I hope that this was helpful, and I wish you luck on your journey through Japanese! :)
ヶ, pronounced か, is a counter that is otherwise 箇 or 個 since it's derived from half of the bamboo (竹) radical. You might also see it rendered instead as か, ヵ or カ. It's not used on its own, but rather you need kanji like 国 or 月 and such to describe the thing that's enumerated. Like saying the number of days, number of languages, doing a head count of people, etc.
One other special usage different from this comes from classical Japanese for place names instead. In this case, it is が/ガ. This is equivalent to the particle の.
