During one of my French lessons awhile back, I learned words related to what I guess I’m going to call “units of food”. One of the funny things about speaking my native language (English) is that I literally never even think about the fact that we have very specific words for these things. They are so far in the background of the everyday language that they are invisible,. We just know them.
For example, in English we say a carton of eggs, box of pasta, pack(age) of cookies, bag of rice, jar of jelly, a bottle (or quart/gallon/etc) – or sometimes a jug – of milk. We say a stick of butter, bar of chocolate, roll of paper towels, tube of toothpaste, tub of margarine. I would never say “jar of milk”, for instance, even if (like jelly) the container was made of glass. Nor would I say a “jug of jelly”. Likewise for saying a “box of eggs” or a “carton of pasta”, even if both of those containers were made of cardboard.
How would one try to articulate the qualities of each of these things and the differences between them to a non-English speaker since it’s not dependent on the shape, size, or material of the container?
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We typically say a slice of pizza or pie and a piece of cake – but those can be used interchangeably. Cheese can come in pieces, slices, chunks, bricks, shreds, or wheels. Bread can be in a loaf, slice, or piece. Corn is the only thing I know that uses “ear” as a unit of measure. Likewise, berries come in flats and grapes come in bunches. Lettuce, cauliflower, and broccoli come in heads, but celery comes by the stalk (with ribs!).
Learning a language as an adult is sometimes confounding, sometimes dismaying (“will I ever memorize all of this stuff??”), and generally challenging. But it can also make us examine our native language a little more closely – odds are, we’ll find similar idiosyncrasies that we otherwise never notice. For me, that makes me respect even more the efforts of people who learn English as a foreign language.
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