GIVE ANSWERS - English

100% GOOD (1 votes)AtsakytaLanguage Question
How to know where the article is placed, and where not


PS: Take a look at these free English educational resources: Free training: Collocations with keepAt allDouble Object Verbs (Ditransitive verbs)GERUNDS

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AussieInBg profile picture AussieInBgOctober 2020

For uncountable nouns, we never use ”a/an”.

 

For example, ”advice” is uncountable in English. We don’t say ”two advices”, we might use ”two pieces of advice”. So, ”He gave me advice” is correct.

You can use a definite article with uncountable nouns - ”The advice that he gave me”. ”advice” is uncountable, but we can define ”which advice”.

MercentPerrault profile picture MercentPerraultSeptember 2020
An unspoken but general rule is that “a” should be used before words beginning with consonants and “an” should be used before words beginning with vowels words which at least sound like they’re beginning with vowels, like for eg, an hour.
Weylin profile picture WeylinSeptember 2020

The basic rule is:

  1. If I know which you mean then use the.
  2. Otherwise if it’s a singular noun use an or a.
  3. Otherwise don’t use an article.

Often people will tell you that it's about something specific, but this is misleading.
If you refer to something specific, but I don't know which one you mean then do not use "the".

There are quite a few more rules.

https://johnsenglishblog.com/posts/articles/