Classifiers (measure words)

Confused? Go back:

Chinese has classifiers (measure words) for nouns.

English has this too. There are a "board" of directors, a "flock" of birds, a "school" of fish, and many more collective nouns. Some of them are rather humorous. If you show this list to a native English speaker, they will probably laugh. Most of these are not serious, and you can get away with saying "group" for everything. Likewise, in Chinese, you can just say "個" and people will understand. Don't worry too much.

http://www.ojohaven.com/collectives/

For some reason, my teacher told me that I have to study these. My homework involved finding the collective nouns for various items based on a picture. Wiktionary has this information, so I decided to extract the data for all the nouns.

I'm keeping track of these in a file, en-wiktionaryClassifiersDefinitions.txt.

Intriguingly, some of them are the same as English. 頭 means head (even on a human). 一頭牛 (yī tóu niú) is one "head" of cattle. The collective noun for many cattle in English is "drove", but the singular is "head". So it's similar. Likewise, 雙 means pair, and 一雙鞋子 (yī shuāng xiézi) is one "pair" of shoes.

In my dictionary, I combine the measure word with the noun, and consider it to be a single word object. Please feel free to add more of these with their nouns as you discover them.