The exercise was to translate: "we are 6 in my family" The answer given is:
"watashi no kazoku wa roku-nin kazoku desu"

I can understand the role of all words except for the second occurrence of
kazoku. As far as I can tell the sentence is complete without it.. "Watashi no
kazoku" = "my family" "Wa roku-nin" = "has 6 people"

Perhaps I am misunderstanding the way the nin counter is used?

(If anyone uses Japanese characters in the reply... I can only read hirigana)
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2016-06-28T23:28:24.490
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2016-06-29T00:16:39.127
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counters
Why is kazoku/family used twice in this sentence?
The thing is translating words for words never works (at least from English to
Japanese).

Here you put _watashi no kazoku_ as your theme. The notion of theme can be
roughly rendered here as follows: "As for my family". Then, you describe the
theme by saying: _roku-nin kazoku desu_ (it's a family with 6 persons).

So what you are saying is: "As for my family, it is a 6-person family". If you
were to remove the second _kazoku_ , you would get: "As for my family, it is 6
persons" (which is understandable but no so good). On the other side, if the
context was clear you could safely remove _watashi no kazoku_ and it would
still mean: "There is 6 members in my family". But without additional context,
_watashi no kazoku wa roku-nin kazoku desu_ is perfectly fine in itself.
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2016-06-29T00:16:39.127
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2016-06-29T00:16:39.127
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