Well the English 'counter words' for animals are also tough aren't they? Ok, a flock of birds everybody knows as well as a murder of crows. But what about an exaltation of larks? And is it a school of dolphins or rather a pod?
I read an interesting article about it a few weeks ago, b̶u̶t̶ ̶I̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶. (Edit: wccrawford linked it: https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crow...) There's a quote from a biologist who studies wombats about the supposedly-correct collective noun for a group of wombats: "Wombats do not form groups in the wild."
And it is a pod of dolphins: https://www.dolphins-world.com/what-is-a-dolphin-pod/
And then there's ridiculous ones, like "a murder of crows", that many people know because they're ridiculous, but people still don't use them.
And then there's a ton that almost nobody knows, and nobody uses.
In the end, it's not a big deal. Unlikely Japanese, where they really do use counters for those kinds of object. Flat things like paper, cylindrical things like beer bottles, etc etc.
https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crow...
To be fair, Japanese has "everday use" counters and "trivia TV show" counters.
Obviously the standard usage of a “piece of paper” is pretty arbitrary, but slice is clearly wrong.
But, yeah, if you told me to pick up some eggs and a a carton/box of beer, I'd know what you probably wanted. (In the latter case, I might ask if you wanted a 6-pack, 12-pack, or 24.)
Because nobody in the UK bothers with group nouns except for a very few (herd of cows, for instance).
Yes.
Usually size comes first: big red metal ball.
red big metal ball sounds wrong to me and so do metal red ball and red metal big ball.
But I'm not sure if it can be succinctly expressed as a general rule. It's just something that native speakers do without thinking, seeing it written in the wrong order or hearing it said in the wrong order just feels wrong to me. Perhaps a linguist could provide a rule, or at least a rule of thumb.
English is full of ordering constraints that matter. This isn't one of them; if you put your adjectives in a strange order, the worst thing that can happen is that people realize you're foreign. [1] And the odds are they knew that anyway, unless you managed to learn perfect pronunciation without absorbing common speech patterns.
[1] They may not even notice. ESL classes treat adjective order as a big deal, but native speakers will often violate the normal constraints if they have to string together several adjectives in a row. You're most likely to be noticed if you put exactly two adjectives in the unconventional order.
So there's a difference between planned speech and rushed speech, and there's piecing together what someone means through their mistakes.
For another example, last night I was watching some Zoom comedy [0] and one of the comedians twice fumbled their joke, saying a word that was important to the punchline too early. So they abandoned the joke and moved on. Inferring what had happened was fairly natural, but you really had to have a robust (as in, fail-safe) grasp of English and, I suppose, culture, to roll with it.
[0] https://www.eventbrite.com/o/best-of-san-francisco-stand-up-...
Well, I meant to; this is what I had in mind when I said "native speakers will often violate the normal constraints if they have to string together several adjectives in a row".
A loaf of bread, a grain of rice, a slice of cheese.
These tend to be common everyday words but if you get them wrong things sound quite off.