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Peanut Buttering

Measure words: hidden in plain sight

If I ask you for gum, I don't say "can you give me a gum", I ask for "a stick of gum". If we're about to play poker, I don't have "a cards", I have "a deck of cards". These are measure words.

A stick of butter, but a a bar of soap.

A glass of water, but a cup of coffee.

A tube of toothpaste, but a roll of toilet paper.

A piece of advice, but an item of clothing.

As a native English speaker you intuitively know that you shouldn't say "a glass of coffee", or "a tube of toilet paper." And if you think about it, you can start to make out the shape of the rules behind each measure word: a stick is longer than a bar, a tube is sealed while a roll is open-ended, etc. Even though no one ever taught you this explicitly, you absorbed it through exposure.

It's a pretty delightful little system, but one it's easy to go your whole life without noticing because it's so natural.

In Chinese, measure words are used even more extensively than in English. The dictionary entries for these words are fun, as they lay out what type of thing the word is used for:

Isn't that cool?

Learning another language brings to light lots of properties of your native language that you previously took for granted. It's a common pattern: you find yourself thinking, "Well that's bizarre! Why is it like that?" but when you think back to your normal, eminently reasonable native tongue, you realize that actually it's full of just as many hidden rules and except-fors and always-well-ok-usually-although-dang-i-dunnos.

You can't orient yourself without first having some external point to orient[1] yourself around. And ideally, you have multiple such points. The more you have, the more you know where you are, and where you might choose to go next.


  1. Fuck I said the word orient too much while editing this sentence and now it sounds weird ↩︎