Amos Paran answers:Hi Yang Zeng.You may know that one of the divisions that we make between different nouns in English is whether the noun is countable or uncountable.
Amos Paran回答道：你好，Yang Zeng。你也許知道，在英語中，名詞的其中一種分類就是可數名詞和非可數名詞。
Examples of countable nouns are words such as ship, bottle, chair, table, pound, computer...
可數名詞的例子有ship, bottle, chair, table, pound, computer...
Examples of uncountable nouns are words such as water, furniture, money, equipment...
不可數名詞的例子有：water, furniture, money, equipment...
Now, whether a noun is countable or uncountable makes quite a difference to the grammatical structures that this noun will be found in.
一個名詞是否是可數名詞會導致其在語法結構中的使用發生很大的變化。
For example, countable nouns have plurals - ships, bottles, chairs, tables.
例如，可數名詞會有復數形式：ships, bottles, chairs, tables。
Uncountable nouns don't have plurals, and grammatically, most of them are singular. so, this equipment is really expensive?
不可數名詞沒有復數形式，而且在語法上，大多數只有單數形式。 例如，這套儀器真的很貴。
The result of this is an additional difference between countable and uncountable nouns - and that is whether we talk about ‘amount' or ‘number'.
這就會導致可數名詞和不可數名詞產生另一種差異，那就是，我們說的數量到底是amount還是number。
We use ‘number' with countable nouns.
可數名詞，我們用number。
So we would say,‘the number of ships', ‘the number of chairs' and so on.
也就是說，我們可以說，‘the number of ships船的數量', ‘the number of chairs椅子的數量' 等等。
With uncountable nouns we use the word 'amount' - so we talk about ‘the amount of furniture', ‘the amount of water', ‘the amount of equipment', and so on.
而對于不可數名詞，我們用amount，也就是說，我們可以說，‘the amount of furniture'家具的數量, ‘the amount of water'水有多少, ‘the amount of equipment'設備的多少等等。