Talking About Quantities in English

Talking about them means being able to express them as a group of things that can be counted or cannot but that is not always easy for the beginner. He has trouble understanding why I can refer to money with some, especially when it can be counted. Then one has to explain that one is talking about an indefinite amount of money or change without referring to it as an exact figure. That is unless one wants to give a dollars and cents value to the amount of cash he has in his pocket.

Quantities are introduced in beginner language courses because it is easy to relate to and because much of what we do on a daily basis is quantify what we have available on us, at work or at home. Countable objects are fun to learn when referring to foods for example or when relating them to a food pyramid. Foods such as fruits and vegetables are usually countable except when they are found in bunches as grapes or other small fruit and are inconvenient to count. So one has some grapes in the fridge and not 25 ones. Using “some” or “any” can also refer to food quantities normally contained in boxes and other containers. This is especially true if those foods are not found in the open or it would be inconvenient to sell them in handfuls. So we have some cereal in a box and some biscuits left over in a package. When we don’t have those foods in our house then we use “any” and not “some.” Similarly the word any is used to ask about the quantity of the food we may have. I used to see that “some” was used with the affirmative question form, but now it appears that “any” is used when one is asking a negative or positive question regarding quantity as in: “Do you have any cheese?”

To convert uncountable amounts into countable, simply refer to the container that the food can be found in. So if you want to talk about some meat as a countable thing, just say you have two packages of it. One would have to know how you call a particular container in English and then put that before the article or food found in it like: “I have a bag of salad or a two bottles of wine.” One does not always have to have a container though to convert an uncountable thing into something countable. An example of that would be the word bunch. So if you have two bunches of carrots, it may be likely that the carrots are found bound together with an elastic band, unless of course they are sold loosely in a package.