What's the classifier for small animals/insects?

[Wang Yao]

Is it 虫 （一虫小蜜蜂?) or am I completely off the mark here... OTL I can't find any classifiers for it on MDBG but I may just have my search phrase wrong or something.

[chrix]

you can try googling it: Link

[Shi Tong]

Yep, I'd say 虫 is the subject here (this is a worm), and not a classifier for any kind of animal (that I know of......)

[trien27]

一虫小蜜蜂

First of all, the way you use 虫, 蟲 in Traditional Chinese, is wrong. It's is not a classifier of any kind. It just means "worm(s)".

小蜜蜂 = small bee = smaller version of an adult bee.

Since logically, and naturally, a bee is not a worm, or vice versa, I can't see how you can put them together in the same sentence?

只, which is 隻 in Traditional Chinese, is used mostly for animals.

The classifier for worms = 條, tiao.

[Jose]

chrix, that nifty use of the wildcard character * in Google searches to find the right quantifiers is so useful! I didn't know you could do that. Thanks for sharing the trick.

[abcdefg]

chrix, that nifty use of the wildcard character * in Google searches to find the right quantifiers is so useful! I didn't know you could do that.

@Jose -- Could you, or Chrix, please expand on that for those of us with slower minds.

[trien27]

chrix, that nifty use of the wildcard character * in Google searches to find the right quantifiers is so useful! I didn't know you could do that.

@Jose -- Could you, or Chrix, please expand on that for those of us with slower minds.

A wildcard character such as * = a symbol that stands for one or more unspecified characters, used especially in searching text and in selecting multiple files or directories. This is from Computer science, aka computer programming, etc...

Source:

http://www.answers.com/topic/wild-card

Definition #3.

[abcdefg]

A wildcard character such as * = a symbol that stands for one or more unspecified characters, used especially in searching text and in selecting multiple files or directories.

Thanks. I do know that much, but still don't understand how to use a wildcard character * to find the appropriate measure word (classifier) in Google.

For example, let's say I forgot that 条 = tiáo was the correct measure word for 龙 = lóng. I tried typing "一*龙" into the search box, and it returned many hits which were articles using 龙.

Perhaps then what I need to do is open one of those articles and see what measure word the writer used with 龙. But I could have just done that by entering 龙 in the search without any wildcard and going to an article that way.

I still think I'm missing something here which is probably obvious to others.

[chrix]

you could try "哪一*龙". But 龙 doesn't strike me as a good example anyways. It's often used in names of any kind (especially on the internet), and not as much referring to dragons, and even much less counting them.

This is just one way of using Google amongst many others. YMMV, but you could also try it with other animals and objects first....

[doraemon]

Generally, I'd say 只 is used for small animals/insects/birds. In the case of long, small creatures I think you would use 条...