tiao

Yesterday I was on the phone with my mom praising the simplicity of Chinese. No complicated prepositional phrases! No verb tenses! The word for "accent" is "kou-yin," which translates literally as "mouth sound." Isn't that beautiful?

Then in today's vocabulary we were introduced to "tiao."

"Tiao" is the measure word for long-narrow objects, such as fish, roads, boats, snakes and trousers, my book says.

Uhh...

In Chinese when counting things you have to use a measure word. You cannot just say "three pens" ("san bi"). You must say "three writing-instrument-measure-word pens" ("san zhi bi").

The measure words we've learned so far have been easy, and the simple "ge" suffices for lots of things - fruit, people, schools, ideas...

Now they tell us we have to use "tiao" for fish, roads, boats, snakes and trousers.

Chinese makes less sense than it did yesterday.