[chao-]

>don't have constructs for... counting words

Having learned both Mandarin and Japanese, I go back and forth on this. While yes counters are more front-and-center in these languages, they are not completely absent in English. We do not explicitly call out (or teach) counters as a part of speech, yet while no one says "two dynamites", everyone will say "two sticks of dynamite". I see 'stick' effectively functioning as a counter there. And while venery terms are not counters, and many of them are unused in modern English, those that do persist occupy a niche that you would notice the absence of, while being decidedly absent in other languages (or in Japanese, I can think off-hand of mure as a catchall for a collective of animals, and it is less specific than English venery terms).

Overall I agree with your assessment of "interesting but a lot of the things are wrong". For instance the statements:

>And some people have used less used English letters to denote specific chinese pronunciations: Eg. in Xi Jinping, "X" is pronounced as "sh", and in Qing, "Q" is pronounced as "ch".

I was always taught that English letter choices in pinyin were not just because "some people had used" them, but as a deliberate choice by Chiense to teach each other proper putonghua, especially speakers of other dialects. And additionally, to accomplish this it borrowed from a Russian perspective on Anglicized sounds, with Russia being both a geographic and political neighbor. I don't know any Russian, but it was taught to me that the "zh-", "q-" and "x-" in pinyin were Russian in origin, albeit in a filtered, haphazard way.

[intertextuality]

Those aren't counters, they're measure words[0]. E.g. I saw two rolls of film or two films. sticks of dynamite, blades of grass, grains of sand. These function differently than counters in other languages.

Korean (and Chinese, I'm assuming) has actual counters/classifiers [1], that is, separate grammatical concepts. 저는 차 두 대를 봤어요 - Here, (대) is the counter for cars (차/차동차). I saw two [counter] cars. This concept doesn't exist in English, except for measure words which serve a different purpose.

For Korean there are around 30-35 or so [2] used in common speech I believe, with 개 being a general catch all for objects. Other examples include: One has to use 명 or 분 for people, and 달 or 개월 for months (duration).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_word

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics)

[2]: http://www.koreanwikiproject.com/wiki/Counting_items

[flomble]

Sure, but the classifiers are highly analogous to the English "counters". Conceptually, 三個人 ("three people") could be interpreted as "three individuals of person".

You could view Chinese nouns as all being mass nouns like English "sand". In the same way you can't say "one sand", but need to add a counter as in "one grain of sand", in Chinese you can't say "one book", you have to say "one volume of book" (一本書).

Sure, you can make distinctions between "classifiers" vs. "measure words" vs. units of measurement, but it feels like the same construct to say 一位人 ("one person"), 一群人 ("a group of people") or 一斤人 ("half a kilo of human"), as grisly as the last one may be.

[intertextuality]

The difference is in Korean or Chinese you need to do it with all nouns that you're counting, unlike English which only reserves it for measuring mass nouns or clarifying between nouns, etc. They way they function is also different, so I would treat them as separate grammatical concepts.

[thaumasiotes]

> The way they function is also different, so I would treat them as separate grammatical concepts.

That would be a good argument, except that the way they function isn't different.

[intertextuality]

The way they function is completely different.

English: measure certain mass nouns or classify certain nouns. Not used for counting every noun.

Korean: Always used, regardless if they measure or clarify. Six dogs, three months, two papers, four volumes, one bowl, ten things all use counters. Always.

The difference is night and day.

[thaumasiotes]

The fact that they are used for all nouns [1] in Chinese / Korean and only one of the two classes of nouns in English is not a difference in the way they are used or the function they perform. It is a difference in which nouns require their use. They have identical grammar and meaning. There is no reason to consider them distinct phenomena; they are one and the same.

[1] Certain things that you might think of as a noun based on English are, in Chinese, measure words which do not measure a noun. For example, 天 "day" and 次 "time" (as in "it happened three times") are syntactically measure words, but it is not possible to follow them with a noun that they notionally measure. This isn't really distinguishable from saying that all English count nouns are really measure words.

[chao-]

I agree that they are ultimately separate and differentiable in a grammatic sense. Mostly I was taking issue with the sentiment in the GP's summary: "Mandarin introduces new grammatical requirements that English ... [doesn't] even have constructs for, like ... counting words." rather than the linguistic specifics.

I firmly feel that, despite being distinct from measure words, they are close enough to English concepts that it isn't really hard to relate to and learn. Gendered inflections are far more inaccessible to me as a native English speaker than counters ever were!

[powerapple]

'X' in Xi is not 'sh', and 'Q' in Qing is not 'ch'. Those sounds do not exist in English, hence English speaker cannot hear or pronounce it correctly. Similarly, it is very hard to Chinese speaker to distinguish some English phonemes.

[chao-]

>'X' in Xi is not 'sh', and 'Q' in Qing is not 'ch'.

That is basically what I was trying to relay: That the choices of letters were picked to represent something "different but close enough", borrowed from alternative Anglicizations that were close at hand.

>Those sounds do not exist in English, hence English speaker cannot hear or pronounce it correctly.

I never had a problem differentiating between the 'q' and 'ch' sounds in Mandarin, and I do not think I am uniquely gifted. Listening to a native speaker pronounce Chongqing for the first time made it immediately obvious. I remember struggling a bit with pronouncing 'zh-' but not because I couldn't hear a difference, it just took a little time. And even despite taking a while to learn the pronunciation, I never struggled in hearing the difference between zhuan and juan.

One doesn't hear letters (or characters for that matter), instead one hears articulations, diphthong, glottal-stops and so forth. I guess you could try to mediate what you hear through an unrelated written language, but that seems like counter-productive extra effort.

[gok]

Pingin "X" is the voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant fricative (ɕ in IPA). It's basically just "sh" with your lips spread wider.

[thaumasiotes]

More accurately, it is the English "sh" if you pronounced it with the middle of your tongue rather than the tip.