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What gets me as a non-native speaker far more than "a vs an" is the "a vs the" conundrum. I still don't quite get when something needs to be "indefinite" and I'
by abraxas 7d ago
What gets me as a non-native speaker far more than "a vs an" is the "a vs the" conundrum. I still don't quite get when something needs to be "indefinite" and I've been speaking English for close to forty years. My native tongue lacks articles altogether and it's soo bloody hard I feel hopeless I'll ever master them fully.
- CoastalCoder 7d agoJust curious, what is your native tongue?
- Laurel1234 7d ago[dead]
- nephihaha 7d agoMy guess is something Slavic (since Slavic languages lack articles apart from Sorbian). I could be wrong. I don't think Finno-Ugric languages have them either. That's just Europe, there are plenty of such examples elsewhere — Japanese has tonnes of suffixes but no direct equivalent to this?
- fonheponho 7d ago(Whether Hungarian qualifies as Finno-Ugric is up for debate, but Hungarian most definitely has determinate and indeterminate articles.)
- machomaster 7d agoFinnish doesn't.
- hackyhacky 6d ago> Whether Hungarian qualifies as Finno-Ugric is up for debate, Is it up for debate? What is the argument against including Hungarian in Finno-Ugric? I mean, the "Ugric" part of Finno-Ugric is in reference to Hungarian.
- hackyhacky 6d ago> since Slavic languages lack articles apart from Sorbian As far as I know (and as confirmed by Wikipedia [1]), Sorbian does not have articles. Maybe you are thinking of Bulgarian, which does have articles (although the definite article attaches as a suffix to the noun, rather than being an independent word). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbian_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbian_languages
- nephihaha 6d agoI read in a book some years ago how some Sorbian speakers had started to use articles under the influence of German, but I've no idea how widespread it was, and I think it's been discouraged during language revival. When Wikipedia says "Sorbian uses no articles", it is not telling the full story. I couldn't find much on this online when I searched for it. But did find at least one respectable reference, which agrees with what I remember: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277973156_Unarticulated_definiteness_Nominal_determination_in_Sorbian_Moving_from_an_articleless_language_to_a_language_with_articles https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277973156_Unarticul... Abstract: "Slavonic languages in general do not use articles to indicate (in)definiteness. The development of an article in some of them is the result of language contact. In the case of Sorbian the influence of German led to the use of the demonstrative pronoun ‘this’ and the numeral ‘one’ to indicate definiteness and indefiniteness, respectively. Originally the German system was copied almost without changes, but eventually specific rules developed, subject to phonotactic constraints and restricting the use of the article mainly to intratextual and pragmatic definiteness. The use of the article depended on the kind of text and language (spoken language, Bible translation and original texts, translations from German). Grammatical purism managed to eliminate the use of the article in today’s written variants as well as in most official uses of spoken Sorbian almost completely. In colloquial language and in the dialects, however, the article is very much alive but its use differs considerably from German. There are also differences between Upper and Lower Sorbian, the latter being closer to German usage." Wikipedia tends to be better on linguistics than some other areas, but best not to become over-reliant on it. This is just one reminder that it does not cover many things.
- fonheponho 7d agoMy guess: Czech. :) Native English speakers living for a decade or more in the Czech Republic (and picking up Czech in the process) may experience "retroactive article confusion", they may start to drop articles while speaking their mother tongue English.
- abraxas 6d agoClose. It's Polish.
- devindotcom 7d agodon't worry too much. english is such a muddled tongue to begin with that there are many ways of saying something "correctly" and few if any of us know them all. anyone who quibbles over some fine verbal point is probably not someone whose opinion you should value! that said I know in business communication this kind of thing can be less forgiving. i will say that grammar and syntax checking for non native speakers is one of the few very beneficial applications of LLMs.
- jampekka 7d agoI struggle with it too, but my rule of thumb is that "the" signals the reader they should know what specific instance is referred to, whereas "a" introduces a new instance.
- deleted 7d ago[deleted]
- arcbyte 7d agoJust remmeber that "a" is short for "any". So do want the specific thing, or will any thing work?
- moritzwarhier 7d agoa specific thing, or is it enough for it to be the thing? sorry, just joking, this is not meant to be a genuine counterargument^^ I just want one of the new triple-cheese sandwiches please. And the salad of the day as a side.
- tandr 7d agoBut... "So do you want _a_ specific thing, or will any thing work?" sounds kind of correct as well to me. (Disclaimer: I am not native speaker, grain of salt and all.)
- rawling 7d agoIt is. Yours is acknowledging that your things are distinguishable and the other person might want one in particular. GP's should be used when offering a specific one, like "the red one".
- lcedp 7d agoIf only it were that simple. "I bought a car yesterday" -- Did I buy a specific car?
- rimeice 7d agoYes you bought the car yesterday - it’s the now because it’s established in the conversation.
- antonvs 7d agoThe point is that in saying "I bought a car", you're not attempting to specify which specific car you bought. The fact that you obviously did buy a specific car isn't relevant to the grammar of this. If the audience already has some context about which specific car you were going to buy, then you could say "I bought the car yesterday." In that case you're referring to a specific car that the audience is expected to already be familiar with. I think some of the confusion over this seems to be coming from attempting to apply knowledge that you have to a sentence when the audience wouldn't have that knowledge.
- AndrewDucker 7d agoIf there's more than one, and you don't care which one, then it's "a". If you care which one then it's "the". "Pass me a plate" - any plate will do. "Pass me the plate" - I want the specific plate which we were talking about.
- layer8 7d agoThat rule isn’t universal though. “I go to the dentist every year” doesn’t imply that I particularly care about a specific dentist (or, case in point, about the specific dentist). “This was a nice evening” is also difficult to characterize as not caring about which evening it is. As are books titled “An Introduction to XYZ”, where both the authors and the readers will probably care about the specific book.
- rawling 7d agoI'm going to the bank, the shop, the dentist, the pool - I have a regular one in mind and you may well also know which one I mean. I'm going to a bank, a shop, a dentist - I've found a new one and I may well be about to describe it to you. "A nice evening" - there have been ones before, there hopefully will be again, this was one of them.
- layer8 7d agoSure, but that’s different from “you do/don't care which one”.
- shhsshs 7d ago“Care” may not be the correct word, but in those examples the difference is whether you are referring to a specific instance, or any instance of a group. When you say “I went to the doctor,” you did in fact go to a specific doctor (or “I will go to the doctor” meaning you will go to one). It would be equally valid to say “I went to a doctor”, it’s just less specific.
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- deleted 7d ago[deleted]
- lwansbrough 7d agoI was going to start by stating the difference is “a” is unspecific, “the” implies the subject is already known. However as I thought more about it I realized it gets a little more complicated. I’m not academically studied in English, though I am a native speaker. For example if you say, “Our town has a castle” - that’s a specific castle but you wouldn’t say “our town has the castle.” Why? It has to do with what the listener knows. “Definite” means the subject is known to the listener. If I’m introducing a castle into the conversation that you don’t know, I’m talking about _a_ castle. Now that it’s introduced, I can tell you about _the_ castle.
- bethekidyouwant 7d agoIf there was only one castle then you would save the. For example our town has “the giant duck” (fictional fibreglass statue)
- mauvehaus 7d ago"Our town has the castle" would mean that of (all the gin joints in) all the towns in all the world, only yours has a castle. Also not academically qualified, also a native speaker.
- adastra22 7d ago
- Tade0 7d agoIt leads to some funny situations. This one time I was at a company get-together and the CTO, whose son was just born, received some Peppa Pig merch. I exclaimed (in English) "Peppa Pig is the shit!" The HR lady stared at me as if I killed her father with an accordion.
- rawling 6d agoThey probably still would have given you a funny look if you'd exclaimed "Peppa Pig is a shit".
- glandium 6d ago> Peppa Pig is the shit I can't resist linking this bit of linguistic humor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igh9iO5BxBo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igh9iO5BxBo
- IAmBroom 5d agoA Japanese struggling to learn English asked me "What means... 'asshole'?" While I struggled to answer, he graphically gestured, and I agreed. "But... also means... 'friend'?" Oh. Big cultural difference. I had to explain how US males used insults as a proxy for affectionate gestures, to someone who uneasily spoke English. He was not fully convinced, I think.
- ccakes 7d agoThis reminds me of “en” vs “ett” in Swedish. No rules - just gotta know
- mitxela 7d agoDer, die, das! ... den, des, dem. But those are derived from the three bass cases.
- stephenhuey 7d agoWhen I was at Rice a quarter century ago, I took a 300-level linguistics class called Structure of English. Half a dozen of us sat around an oval table in a little room and I was the only one not majoring in linguistics. It was a delightfully geeky bunch. One of the students later worked on speech recognition at Microsoft. The professor was an older tall thin man who always wore suspenders and a bow tie. I had always been good at grammar in high school, but this was a different world and I had no idea what I was in for. We spent the first two weeks discussing the differences between the and a, and the next two weeks on the differences between this and that, and the rest of the semester felt more abstract. It was quite illuminating for me.
- shagie 7d agoAblaut reduplication is my favorite thing from linguistics. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication#English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication#English ) Tic-tac-toe. Flip flop. Live, Laugh, Love. Zig Zag. It's all I-A-O. Switch any of those around and it doesn't sound right. Learning about the order of adjectives (big old red ball - try swapping any of those around) when I was dabbling in Klingon and the affix contests ( https://klingon.wiki/En/WordplayContest https://klingon.wiki/En/WordplayContest ) of noun suffixes having to be in a certain order ( https://klingon.wiki/En/NounSuffix https://klingon.wiki/En/NounSuffix and https://klingon.wiki/En/RelativeOrderingOfSuffixes https://klingon.wiki/En/RelativeOrderingOfSuffixes ).
- rawling 6d ago> It's all I-A-O. Switch any of those around and it doesn't sound right. And from this we can extrapolate what flip flops would be called if we had three feet! Also see https://www.poetryverse.com/spike-milligan-poems/on-ning-nang-nong https://www.poetryverse.com/spike-milligan-poems/on-ning-nan...
- weinzierl 7d agoI feel you. I live in Germany and we have many people whose mother tongue is a slavic language here and they all get it wrong to some degree. I'd still like to encourage you to put some energy into getting it right because this mistake is very confusing for native speakers of a language that makes the distinction. I cannot tell you how often I was listening to someone telling me a story about the thing where I sat impatiently waiting for them telling me which particular thing or person they ment only to realize they were not talking about something particular at all.
- necovek 6d agoWhile I am natively Slavic (Serbian) and my German is abysmal — you've never struggled with me I am sure, as I likely would not try a long story :) — I believe my English is sufficiently good that I run into similar issues with others speaking "improper" English. But here I find it's mostly about trying to get into their linguistic framework when trying to understand them, and with my background of native Serbian being a very phonetic language, I can easily figure out when someone is coming from a more phonetic background: eg. or pronouncing "j" sound like "y" in "yay", more literal reading of other letters, etc. You obviously expect them to miss out on articles, tenses and even word ordering, so you work it all backwards. A bit like that trick for LLMs with broken, concise English. So I really put it on me to re-process their language into what is the likely message they are trying to convey, and do not expect the precision of a native speaker. It is hardest when someone's command of a language seems to be high (eg. they have great pronunciation and decent vocabulary), yet the basics are all wrong :) And in some cases, it helps to know a bit of their native tongue, like with the Spanish and all of those "e-station" instead of "station", "e-static" instead of "static" (no, not "ecstatic" :), "e-sports" instead of "sports" etc.
- berekuk 7d agoSame here. Every few years I try to go through https://englishpage.com/articles/index.htm https://englishpage.com/articles/index.htm to internalize more rules but it doesn't fully stick, and it's the only part of English that makes me self-conscious.
- nutjob2 7d agoIn programming terms 'a' is followed by a type name and 'the' is followed by a variable name.
- nutjob2 7d agoI have the opposite problem. I speak a non-English language (poorly) that hasn't got 'a' or 'the' so I end up shoehorning other words into the sentence to take their place, such as 'one [particular item]' for 'the' and 'some [item]' for 'a'. I likely sound like an idiot when I talk. Non native speakers of English have similar ticks. But (in)definite articles aren't difficult, you're either talking about some member of a group or class of items without specifying which one (a), or you're talking about one particular example or instance that is being referenced in context (the). I don't understand how languages can talk about things precisely without them. I guess they just use context, more or other words in their place, or structure sentences differently. English just feels convenient in this case, but obviously I am biased.
- bonoboTP 7d agoEven languages that have both indefinite and definite articles use them slightly differently, for example Spanish, German, English and Hungarian have them, but the rules of their use is somewhat different, though the main idea is similar. It takes time to learn things like "at school" vs "at the school", "to school", "to the school", "I know English", not "I know the English", but "I know the English language" etc. etc. It's obviously easy when you speak it natively, but it just happens to be a certain way and could plausible be in another way too, as other languages show.
- nutjob2 7d agoThe funny thing is is that all the examples you gave are correct English. [I learned it] "at school" - I learned it at school, I'm not specifying which school [I learned it] "at the school" - I learned it at school, the one that was referenced "I know the English" - I know the English people "I know the English language" - I know the English language (specifically) The point being that articles do a lot of work. They're not just decoration whereby there is some arbitrary correct form or rule. It's a matter of what you want to say. But in the third and forth sentences 'English' is both a collective noun and the name of a language which is just a coincidence.
- 6d ago
- ivanbakel 7d agoWhat's interesting about the replies to this comment how readily people provide post-hoc justifications for language features that often have no essential rhyme or reason. The same is true for the prepositions which accompany verbs, which tend to vary by language, but for which every language's speaker will gladly offer you "rules" or "explanations" for when they fit. It's great evidence that we can be very good at something with no communicable understanding of what it is we actually know.
- joquarky 6d agoUsually happens when a person answers a "why" question to something they did without thinking.
- pessimizer 6d ago> people provide post-hoc justifications for language features that often have no essential rhyme or reason. Nah. English articles make sense, they're just usually unnecessary, and languages can often do without the information they add (or they reduce ambiguity in other ways.) English articles certainly reduce the context necessary to understand an isolated sentence. In Spanish, for example, knowing the subject of the conversation or even knowing what's going on in the surroundings of the speaker might be necessary to understand a subjunctive. In English, hearing a definite article will tell you that you've missed something if you don't know what it refers to; hearing an indefinite one will assure you that you haven't. Hearing an article at all will assure you that the noun isn't being verbed (if it's not obvious.) It's impossible to tell what some Spanish sentences mean in isolation, because you don't know who would do, could do, should do, or was doing the thing. Means nothing in normal conversation. Koreans are like "how do you even know how old they were?" Quechua are like "how do you even know how they found out?" There's a good reason for everything in language, because if we don't need it, it will just get dropped. The obvious purpose of a thing might not be the reason that it is necessary, though. It may plug an ambiguity hole left by other parts of the language. It may be necessary socially/religiously. It may just reduce to a tolerable level the amount of thinking one has to do before beginning to speak. > It's great evidence that we can be very good at something with no communicable understanding of what it is we actually know. Definitely true, but this is a bad example. English adjective order is the really good example that people usually cite. We don't even know that we're doing it. Also all of our weird grammatical tones, and our strong word/phrase -initial stress. Shifting that stuff changes meanings completely, everybody understands, nobody notices. Except people coming from tonal languages, trying their best not to sound like robots or broken tape recorders. The "I don't know" noise, "[note]mmm[higher note]MMM[middle note]mmm," and the other weird sing songy grunts we do that are words. Our crazy vowels. The fact that the word "tests" is a voiced click and two hisses. And that's not even getting into politeness - and the difference between modulating politeness and indexing politeness. English speakers modulate. Speakers of many Asian languages index. We change forms of address as a way to express how we currently feel about someone, whereas when a Korean person starts dropping honorifics, it almost means they don't even think you're human.
- TacticalCoder 7d ago> What gets me as a non-native speaker far more than "a vs an" is the "a vs the" conundrum. I still don't quite get when something needs to be "indefinite" and I've been speaking English for close to forty years. "a vs the" is quite easy IMO. Most non-native however do not use "that" and "which" properly though. "Give me the floppy disk that is blue" and "Give the floppy disk, which is blue" are two different things.
- mitxela 7d agoNobody says that. "Give me the blue floppy disk"
- shoobiedoo 7d agoMy wife is Japanese and fluent in English but still almost always mixes up the and a. I think part of the problem is that it just barely sneaks under the radar of a mistake that is bad enough to confuse English first language speakers in everyday use. So theres no impetus to correct it
- wccrawford 6d agoEven as a native, I didn't know the difference until I looked it up right now, and I'm almost 50. Short form, for those who wonder: "That" is used for things that are important, and "which" is used for things that aren't. In the first sentence, they want the blue floppy disk in particular. In the second, they want the floppy disk, and it happens to be blue. The "which" is added to aid the listener, not to because the color blue is important. If that's interesting, it's worth Googling for a more precise answer.
- vlyan 7d agoditto. I never actually studied English, so I just YOLO the articles most of the time. tenses too, really. whenever I look something up, there are caveats and irregularities, and I give up. I know, in my heart of hearts, that I sound painfully ESL to proficient native speakers, but they are a minority of a minority, so.
- deleted 7d ago[deleted]
- grishka 7d agoAs a Russian who's fluent in English, I feel like I ended up learning it mostly by example (Slavic languages lack articles, but we have other fun things for people learning them to trip up on, like cases). But a more general rule seems to be that it's "the" if you can point your finger at that particular thing or rephrase it with "that", otherwise it's "a".
- gucci-on-fleek 7d agoThere's an episode [0] [1] in a famous Canadian comedy that makes fun of this distinction: > Brent: Ah, the tax man. > Drey: A tax man. > Brent: Pardon? > Drey: I'm not the tax man, I'm a tax man. Saying the tax man is just a little dehumanizing, thank you very much. […] > Brent: A tax man. And whatever you, don't call him "the tax man." Call him "a tax man" or he kinda goes squirrelly on ya. > Wanda: Some people are sensitive about article use. > Brent: About what? > Wanda: Proper article use. "A" or "an" are indefinite articles. "The" is a definite article. In fact, some people say "the" is "the" definite article. […] > Hank: I know what I'm doing. We get the tax man... > Brent: A tax man. > Wanda: Actually, in this case you can say "the" tax man, because you're referring to a particular person. [0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0546137/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0546137/ [1]: https://cornergas.fandom.com/wiki/Tax_Man https://cornergas.fandom.com/wiki/Tax_Man
- ifh-hn 6d agoI was going to ask whether articles might go the way of pronouns in that people might latch onto them and start demanding you refer to them only using a particular article when they're not around, like some do with pronouns. Then email signatures could be: they/them/an
- UltraSane 6d agoYou use the word "a" for interchangeable, fungible items and "the" for specific, unique, non-fungible items.