I don't know about Mandarin, but Korean counting words are very different from English collective nouns.
English: one animal, one person, one book
Korean: han mari, han myeong, han gweon.
Where 'han' is one, and the other three words are the counting words specific for counting animals, people, and books respectively.
Collective nouns, a common feature of Indo-European languages, are not an exact equivalent of counting words in Korean, Japanese, Chinese and other Southeast Asian languages, they are their nearest functional equivalent though.
It is not unfathomable (in fact, it is rather common) to conjure up the following conversation:
- How much milk (bread) do I have to buy?
- Two packets (two loaves), please.
In this context, packets and loaves fulfill the same role as the Korean counting words although they are multifunctional words, indeed.
Grammatically, yes (with a few caveats). Phonetically… perhaps not so much. Mandarin has a pretty poor phonetic inventory having lost a large number of sounds (including finals) throughout the history of its development. Words in Mandarin tend to be longer (as in having 3 syllables on the average) compared to other Chinese languages that have retained more sounds.
> The only ”weird” parts are tonality and those darned counting words.
There is nothing specifically weird about them. English has them too, they are called «collective nouns», i.e. «a flock of birds», «two shivers of sharks», «an ambush of DevOps engineers», «three pandemoniums of webdevs», «murders of Deloitte consultants», «a dazzle of Rust developers» or «a pitying of enterprise architects». Flock, shiver, ambush, pandemonium, murders, dazzle, pitying are your «darned» counting words.