What do we mean by ‘classifiers’? Put simply, it’s using one thing to count another. Thai does not use plurals, so we cannot say 2 coffees or 3 cats; it just doesn’t work. This is where classifiers come in.

Think of uncountable nouns in English and how we count them using another measure, like these examples with the classifiers in bold:

• a bunch of bananas
• a loaf of bread
• 2 cups of tea
• 4 glasses of wine
• 10 litres of water

Thai, however, uses classifiers all the time. Whenever we want to specify a quantity of something we must use the correct classifier. Each noun/object has a specific classifier which should be used in the sentence when you are referring to a number of items.

A classifier is generally used with a category of nouns which have a common characteristic, although these groupings often seem arbitrary. It’s therefore a good idea to memorise the classifier along with the noun when learning new vocabulary.

There are dozens of classifiers used in Thai, many of which you’ll never come across. This list is a good starting point:

In the next lesson we’ll see how to use classifiers to count objects.