[QUOTE=Hari Seldon]
In Japanese they apparently have around 20 different classes of nouns. There is one class for humans, another for mammals, a third for birds, and one for fish. But squirrels are in the bird class (so maybe it should be the tree-dwellers) and similarly, the sea mammals are classified as fish. The remaining classes, as far as I am informed, are basically shapes: stick-shapes, broad flat things, so on.
[/QUOTE]
I think I know what phenomenon you’re talking about, but it’s not really like grammatical gender.
What happens is that in Japanese, when you reference a number of objects (like how in English we might say “Three bananas,” “Five oranges” or “Ten thousand maniacs”) you can’t just say, for example, “eight computers” but rather you must say “eight units of computer.” But the problem for people trying to learn Japanese is that there are (not just around twenty, but) dozens of words for “unit,” depending on classifications like the ones you mentioned. (“Flat things,” “stick-like things,” “bundled things,” “cups,” “people,” and so on.)
Of course we do this in English sometimes as well: “Three sheets of paper” and so on. But in Japanese you do this (very nearly almost) every time you reference a number of objects. It can be intimidating for non-native speakers.
My wife once tried to buy stamps at the post office. She said in broken japanese something that amounts to “stamps… two… please” The person at the counter responded with “nimai?” Which means roughly “two sheets?” (Two stamps, though, not two sheets of stamps.) My wife didn’t understand “nimai,” and simply repeated, “Two.”* The other repeated again, “nimai?” This went back and forth a few times.
I don’t know if the counterperson was being purposefully obtuse or whether she genuinely couldn’t understand what my wife meant by “stamps… two… please.” But my point is just to illustrate that awkwardness can result from the failure to employ the usage I’m describing.
Sorry, that was kind of an aside, but hopefully not completely uninteresting.
-FrL-
*By the way something else that confounds some learners of Japanese is the fact that there are two numbering systems in Japanese. When you talk about the numbers one through ten by themselves, without using them to count something, then you employ these words: hitotsu, futatsu, mitsu, yotsu, itsutsu, mutsu, nanatsu, yattsu, kokonotsu, to. But the numbers for one through ten when you’re using them as “counters” are ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyu, ju. Beyond the number ten, you always just use numbers constructed from the latter system: there is no way to say a number greater than ten in the former system. And to make things just a little more confusing, the words for four and seven in the former system “yotsu” and “nanatsu” are sometimes imported over into the “counter” system so that, for example, people say “yojin” and “nanajin” for “four people” and “seven people” respectively, rather than *shijin or *shichijin. The circumstances under which “yo” and “nana” are appropriate instead of “shi” or “shichi” are not formulable: they are just a set of exceptions you have to learn by rote. Frustrating.