Measuring Up

I’m sorry I haven’t posted in a while, I haven’t really been up to much of note this week, and the most exciting thing I did was go out to eat really good Italian food for a friend’s birthday. Since that has very little to do with China, I felt a full account was unnecessary.

I thought I’d take some time to write a bit about Chinese language, as it’s what I’m studying here and therefore what I spend a lot of time thinking about. So here’s my primer on Chinese measure words, or “amount words” as they are called in Chinese. Measure words are not entirely foreign to English speakers: we wear a pair of pants, buy a head of lettuce, watch a set of television and discuss an item or article of business. We also have the ones that actually indicate quantity, such as pound, bouquet, bale, bunch, cup, bag, dozen, etc. In Chinese, however, any time you quantify a noun, you need to use a measure word. Though the general word “ge” will work for most things that don’t have a particular word assigned, there are more specific words assigned to various types of items. Many are concrete, like a cup of coffee or an envelope of letter or a gram of rice. But there are also more abstract ones, for example, “ben” is for things books and things that are bound, “zhang” is for things that are flat like paper, pictures and tables, and “liang” is for vehicles.

There is generally a rule governing when to use what measure word, whether or not is immediately obvious. For instance, the word “tiao” applies to fish, pants, roads, string and rivers (things that are longer than they are wide). Much like English, “jian” applies to clothing like shirts and jackets, as well as business or tasks, and means “item” or “article”. “Ke” is used for teeth, pearls, stars and, by extension, satellites. The rule for that one is things that are small and round.

Sometimes looking at a list of items a word quantifies raises more questions than it answers, and it often helps to look at the meaning of the word itself. Perhaps my favorite is “ba”; the list of words to use with “ba” includes sugar, knives, brooms and hair; ba means “to grasp”, and so measures things that come in handfuls or things with handles. “tai” means stage, platform or station, and measures performances, engines and computers. Still others seem obscure but are actually quite literal. The word “chuan” means to conspire or gang up, or to run about from place to place, among several other unrelated meanings. It is also a measure word for kebabs and keyrings. Turns out the original meaning of the word is “to string together”, and the character 串is a pictograph.

Some measure words are ridiculously practical and translate poorly, for instance there is one for regularly scheduled public transportation, one for instances, and one for a class or field of study (that’s a semester-long class, not to be confused with one sitting of class, which is measured by a different word).

So the next time you put on an article of jacket and get in a vehicle of car to drive down a length of road to go to a house of restaurant and buy several plates of food, just be glad you’re not doing it in Chinese.