II. Some distinctive features of Chinese

The use of measure words (classifiers) is obligatory whenever a numeral is used to count things, or a demonstrative pronoun such as "this" or "that" precedes a noun. Usually different class of nouns takes a different measure word (classifier). It is, to some extent, similar to the collocations of "a piece of paper", "two cups of tea", and "this pair of glasses" in English.

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