measure word of 香蕉 (个，根，条，只)

[Kenny同志]

條 to my feeling is for long things that bend more than once, or that can bend and unbend. Fish and roads qualify, but not bananas, they are rigid.

一条扁担、一条香烟、一条裤子、一条人命、一条狗

I think the classifier is all about custom, or the habitual way we speak it. It is inexplicable in many cases.

个is used in a lot of places it "shouldn't" be used, and my Taiwanese friends and teacher told me it's either an indication of lazyness or lack of education.

It is not so in dialects, but in Mandarin, it is.

BTW- in reply to Lu, isn't 条 mostly used in conjunction with wire/ thread/ rope/ string? Indicating that your answer is right?.. I know that most people say "yi 条 xian" for "one (length of) string".

Besides 条, 根 is also a very good option.

一根（条）绳子、一根（条）线、一根（条）绳索

[chrix]

No reason to get upset about it, most grammars of Mandarin Chinese mention this trend. I'm not just making things up. Of course the extent is debatable, as any ongoing process. Li and Thompson mention that for many native speakers 那個菜 and 那個大砲 have become perfectly acceptable (p. 112). They also caution that many nouns despite this trend still require special classifiers, and which ones must be memorised.

It's also clear that in most cases for formal Mandarin, you should use the specific classifier, but you'll get a lot of variation in colloquial speech. That's why I suggested looking at google, it's not a great tool for this kind of thing (it would be better to dig through corpora and academic articles), but you'll find plenty of examples where native speakers will use ge in situations you personally might not want to.

[Shi Tong]

I agree with Chrix and Kenny that the "rules" dont always apply in a lot of cases where somtimes you can use different classifiers in different cases for the same objects.

Hell, I even use it for jokes too, like my children are definately 只 and they have the radical for dog/ cat next to them when I talk about them!!

[Lu]

Shi Tong: rope is also long and bendy, so would also qualify.

Kenny: mine is certainly not a clear-cut definition, and there are many cases that don't quite fit, or where other measure words are also okay. It's more of a feeling, this sort-of-definition immediately told me that a banana cannot be 條.

That being said:

一条扁担: never used this word, so can't really comment here.

一条香烟: I would definitely use 只 here.

一条裤子: pants can twist and bend and untwist.

一条人命: as can lives, although in a more metaphorical sense.

一条狗: I would use 只 here.

Usage may differ from place to place, or from person to person, though.

[Kenny同志]

Kenny: mine is certainly not a clear-cut definition, and there are many cases that don't quite fit, or where other measure words are also okay. It's more of a feeling, this sort-of-definition immediately told me that a banana cannot be 條.

That being said:

一条扁担: never used this word, so can't really comment here.

一条香烟: I would definitely use 只 here.

一条裤子: pants can twist and bend and untwist.

一条人命: as can lives, although in a more metaphorical sense.

一条狗: I would use 只 here.

一条扁担、一只扁担 are both OK

一条烟一般有十包 一包烟一般二十只（or 根）.

一条烟 ususally contains ten packs of cigarettes; a pack of cigarettes usually has twenty.

一条人命 is the only correct collocation.

一条狗 and 一只狗 are both OK.

You are right. It is sometimes a personal choice. I offered the list just to show that some phenomenon is simply inexplicable.

Edited March 6, 2010 at 01:55 AM by kenny2006woo

[xiaocai]

Shouldn't it be 一支烟?

一条烟 ususally contains ten packs of cigarettes; a pack of cigarettes usually has ten.

Hehe, obviously you do not smoke kenny. There are normally 20 cigarettes in a pack.

[xiaotao]

I don't know how to enter in characters.

The following will do:

yi1 ba3 xiang1jiao1 for a bunch of bannanas

yi ge xiang jiao

yi gen xiang jiao

[xiaocai]

yi1 ba3 xiang1jiao1 for a bunch of bannanas

I don't know where you are from but I don't think 一把香蕉 will not do very well. And please, read other people's posts before you reply.

[chrix]

What would you say, then, for a bunch of bananas?

FWIW, 一把香蕉 has 191K hits on Google

My dictionary says 一串香蕉 (171K hits on Google)

[xiaocai]

I think 一串香蕉 sounds much better to me...

Hmm, google returned me 1,920,000 results for 一串香蕉.

[chrix]

Another reason Google is not the best tool... After playing around with some options, it returned the same 1.92 million number

I think nominal classifiers is actually an area in Mandarin grammar, where there is an enormous variation in native speaker judgements, so the best thing learners could do is first to firmly entrench the standard classifier rules as taught by grammar books, and then go from there and note local and/or colloquial variaition

Trying to pick it up on the street will result in confusion, unless you stay in the same street

[xiaotao]

There are different ways for different regions. Don't get stuck on the little stuff.

[Kenny同志]

Shouldn't it be 一支烟?

Both 一支烟 and 一根烟 are fine. The difference is that 一根烟 is more colloquial.

Yes, I don't smoke. Sorry for giving the wrong number.

[Kenny同志]

@Chrix

I would say 一串香蕉 or 一爪香蕉

[xiaocai]

I also say 一爪香蕉, my parent say it as well. But some of my friends find it funny. Yes I agree it is more of a regional difference, and I will take the first part of what I said in post #28 back.

[Hofmann]

FYI, in Cantonese I would always use 條. 隻 is acceptable. Also, I would call them 蕉, not 香蕉.

[daofeishi]

Just a comment on using google to analyze word frequencies - don't do it (indicriminately)

Google's pagerank algorithm uses approximate methods to guess how many results that match your keywords, and can be off by several orders of magnitude. That is why you can get results in the thousands on certain keywords, only to discover that the set of results ends at page two. It also means that word frequencies are not accurately represented by the number of estimated google hits. "一只香蕉" for example actually stops after about 700 hits if you scroll through the results until you reach the end.

I found an article on this a while back, I'll see if I can dig it back up.

The moral is: If you want to analyze word frequencies, you have to search through a proper text corpus

As an aside, I myself would use 根

Edited March 6, 2010 at 09:36 AM by daofeishi

[chrix]

daofeishi, we've discussed Google several times here, and that's why I attached all these caveats to the Google data. There aren't simply good comprehensive corpora available. 687K words is laughable, you need at least a couple million words (better at least 10 million) and even then some phrases like "a bunch of bananas" might not occur frequent enough to be significant.

Absent that, you have to work with the biggest non-scientific corpus available, which is Google. The numbers thing though is a huge problem.

[Kenny同志]

How do you say 一爪香蕉 and 一串钥匙 in English then？I mean the most frequently used expression.

[HashiriKata]

a bunch of bananas.