English Grammar (articles): 'A' and 'the' in two weeks

There are two types of noun groups in English: countable and uncountable. In this lecture we will help you understand the differences. This will help you to make better article choices.

In our last lesson we looked at differences between countable and uncountable nouns. 

In this lesson we’ll look in more detail at this topic focusing on four kinds of uncountable nouns: group, abstract, substances and school subjects.

In this section we would like you to review once again about countable nouns and uncountable nouns. It is very important to practice over and over again in order to master the language.

It can be quite difficult to try to decide what kind of noun is countable or uncountable, and it could take a long time to remember them all. 

But there are some tools that can help you. Of course a dictionary is the most wonderful tool but sometimes we need a bit more help.

One such tool is free provided by Google. It is called Ngram viewer. In  this lecture we take a look at what it can do.

In this lesson we will look at whether nouns carry known or new information - this is one of the reasons to choose the.

There are four possible combinations of new and known information. These depend on the point of view of the speaker and listener. 

We will look at each in turn.

We have seen in the previous lectures that there are four different combinations of new and known information that impact on our choice of articles.

In this lesson we look at four different emails which have examples of these combinations in context.

In previous lessons we explained how countable nouns can take a or an, or take plural forms. In order to make our explanations as clear as possible, we did not talk about plurals much in our previous lessons. 

In this lesson, we will complete rule 2 (new or known information) by including examples of plural forms as well. The examples are taken from an informal email exchange.

In this lesson we introduce our third rule which is whether a noun is specific or generic.

In previous lesson our examples applied to individual nouns (such as water or apple). In this lesson we give examples using common noun preposition noun phrases (such as 'a solution to a problem').

In the previous lesson, we learned the difference between specific and generic using noun preposition noun patterns with countable nouns.

In this lesson we add uncountable noun examples.

In this lesson we continue to look at rule 3 (specific or generic) in a systematic way.

We look at countable noun preposition noun examples and contrast them with uncountable ones. 

In this lesson we move on to our fourth and final rule. This is less a rule but more some examples of fixed phrases that don’t really change very much.

There are three main types: to do with time; with location; and, greetings.

We look at each in turn. 

In this lesson we put all four rules together. 

We review the four rules and then practically apply them in a business email.

In this final lesson we briefly mention three article uses that might have been puzzling you during the course:

1. Nouns that are both countable and uncountable.

2. Examples of nouns that take ‘the’ when you might not expect it including nationalities and musical instruments. 

3. Finally, a brief word on pronunciation.