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My friend who is not a native English speaker told me that one thing he struggled the most while learning English was the "a" and "an". He couldn't grasp the co
by varispeed 4y ago
My friend who is not a native English speaker told me that one thing he struggled the most while learning English was the "a" and "an". He couldn't grasp the concept how it is possible that person knows which determiner to use before saying the word, until he learned it as just the part of the word and then he uses it depending on the context which one can "feel". So when he sees an apple, he says this is an apple.
Exactly what you mean by bigram.
- caf 4y agoAnd of course it is not unheard of for a native English speaker to correct themselves if they change their mind about which noun to use. You can imagine being asked to very rapidly verbally classify fruits ("it's an apple, it's an apple, it's a pear, it's an apple,..") that you might well find yourself stumbling like "it's a.. an apple".
- PeterisP 4y agoThis is also why a bunch of words have changed - e.g. apron was originally called napron, but when people were saying "a napron" it got mangled to "an apron"..
- chimpansteve 4y agoIt's also not unheard of for native English speakers to use it differently (in speech, at least) as a consequence of regional accents. I would use "a history book", because my accent pronounces the h sound. My wife says "an istory book", because her accent drops the h. But yeah, it should be easier when you're just dealing with text I guess
- hgsgm 4y agoDoes his language have grammatical gender?
- sunk1st 4y agoThe rule is the rule because that’s what make sense phonetically. It’s why you would say “el agua” and “el hacha” in Spanish even though those articles don’t match the gender of those words.
- alain94040 4y agoAnother interesting case is possessive in French: une hache - ma hache une horloge - mon horloge
- BaseballPhysics 4y agoNow really bake their noodle and ask what they put before the word 'history' or the acronym 'LLM'? :)
- SamBam 4y agoAre there languages that don't have similar patterns? Obviously any romance language includes gender, so you need to use the correct gendered article before the noun. Japanese has different counting words depending on what you're counting. I don't know if Mandarin has anything similar.
- renonce 4y agoMandarin speaker here. There are indeed different counting words for different nouns, so for a bird (鸟) you say 一只鸟 and for a chair (椅子) you say 一把椅子.