Learner-friendly language in some ways: 03 (Measure words / Classifiers)

The Chinese terms for "collective nouns" are "measure words (mw) / classifiers".

    The most avid reader / supporter of my blogs, old friend Valerio, has inspired this blog by asking how the Chinese language compares with the English on this front.  He has posted up a clever selection of English examples to show how difficult the English language can be for the learner:

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...another bewildering aspect of English is the large number and variety of collective names for animals:
a murder of crows, a parliament of owls, a business of ferrets, a pandemonium of parrots, an unkindness of ravens...
How does Chinese compare in this respect?

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  The first major difference is that Chinese uses a measure word for everything, singular or plural, whilst English doesn't (e.g., can say "a dog" / "a table", but not "a vinegar" / "a milk").

(from googling) 

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There is no exact, official number of collective nouns in the English language, as they are constantly evolving. While there are roughly 200 commonly used collective nouns, there are hundreds, potentially thousands, of archaic, highly specialized, or whimsical terms, with many stemming from 15th-century "terms of venery" for animals and birds.

There are over 200 measure words (classifiers) in Mandarin Chinese, but only about 30–50 are commonly used in daily conversation. While comprehensive dictionaries may list up to 187 or more, roughly 24 core measure words handle most usage, with the general-purpose classifier 个 (gè) accounting for over 90% of daily interactions. 

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    With so many measure words, it can feel overwhelming when it comes to using them.    

    I teach a lot of strategies to my Mandarin students, to help them feel less at sea with the language.  One of the strategies is called Onion Rings (my coinage):  to deal with the language on different levels, starting with the outermost ring which is the most generalised-rule one.

    For measure words, the near-universal one is 

个 (simplified script) or 個 (traditional script) 

ge 

"unit/item of"  

    The word order is:  number mw noun

e.g., 一个人 / 一個人 / yī ge rén / "one mw person"

    个 (/ 個 / ge) is used with whatever the number is that is being counted:  one person (一个人 / 一個人 / yī ge rén), or ten persons (十个人 / 十個人 / shí ge rén).

    The detailed breakdown for when to use 个 (/ 個 / ge) is a bit less simplistic.  Generally (just the tip of the iceberg):

YES for humans (一个人 / yī ge rén / a person; 一个孩子 / yī ge háizi / a child); 

YES for geographical words (e.g., country / 一个国家 / yi ge guójiā; place / 一个地方 / yī ge dìfāng);

NO for roads, streets, etc; 

NO for creatures (animals, birds, sea creatures);

NO for most inanimate objects (e.g., vehicles; tables, chairs; clothes [trousers, dresses, skirts, shirts] and shoes); 

but YES for some inanimate objects (e.g., door / 一个门 / yī ge mén; computer / 一个电脑 / yī ge diànnǎo; cooking pot / 一个锅 / yī ge guō)

etc.

    As you can see, it's a bit complicated, because it isn't clear / logical why, given that "个 / 個 / ge" only means "an item of / a unit of", it should not apply to everything if one doesn't know their precise measure word.

    I teach my students that should they be in doubt which measure word to use (either had never learned it, or can't remember although they had been taught), to always use 个 rather than leave that space unfilled, even if it's the wrong measure word for that noun.  The mw 个 (/ 個 / ge) doesn't account for any shape (which a lot of measure words do), so it works well enough, even though it doesn't apply to animals, for example.

    The English sort-of-equivalent I use is: for the time 8.05, the "0" has to be sounded, can't say "eight five" as the listener will have trouble processing "eight five", so even if you were to say "eight nought five" instead of "eight o / zero five", it might get understood more easily than simply "eight five".    

    The other umbrella measure word is 些 xiē / "some / several / a few / a number of", used for referring to the said noun as a cluster unspecified in number, e.g., 一些人 / yī xiē rén / "several mw people".  This works even better (but only for plural reference), as it's applicable to humans, animals, inanimate objects, abstract words (e.g., suggestion, idea, concept, policy).  Any word, any shape or form.