guardian_learning

From:

I'm especially taken by 颗 for small objects (一颗珠子, a pearl) and objects appearing small (一颗星星, a star).

I get confused about 颗 because almost the only place I ever hear it is in song lyrics where it's usually 一顆心, even though hearts are... not really that small? Cantonese has a different measure word for "small round things," and counts hearts with 个, so I just think of 颗 as the special literary way to count hearts. XD

How do you count stars up close?

I just went to look into this, and apparently a star in the scientific/astronomical sense is 恆星, which... also takes 颗 as its classifier!

There's also 星球, which refers to celestial objects in general (but seems to mostly be used for planets?), and Google results are suggesting that this takes 颗 as well.

(ETA: Oh, actually, looking at the Wikipedia list, it looks like the word I know for small things in Cantonese is also used for small things in Mandarin -- it's 粒, which Wikipedia says is for "grains" of things like rice. Cantonese uses this for pearls and stars, too, but looking at some examples, it seems like in Mandarin it's for actual grains.)