In Burmese, classifiers or measure words, in the form of particles, are used when counting or measuring nouns.
Nouns to which the classifiers refer to can be omitted if the context allows, because many classifiers have implicit meanings.
The only exceptions to this rule are measurements of time or age (minutes, hours, days, years, etc.
), where a preceding noun is not required, as the time measurement acts as a measure word.
See IPA/Burmese for an explanation of the phonetic symbols used in this section.