An Article about Articles

Practice listening and speaking (音頻在這裡)

This is an article about articles.

The word article has a few meanings:

• Article - a piece of writing that provides information about a topic.
• Article - a word used to modify a noun, which is a person, place, object, or idea.

Articles are as important in English as measure words are in Chinese. Sentences without articles sound very strange to native speakers as would a Chinese sentence without measure words.

"這四男人" looks and sounds very strange and may confuse people with "這死男人" without "個" before "男人".

There are two main kinds of articles: definite (the) and indefinite (a/an).

The concept of articles is easy but being able to use articles correctly requires a lot of practice. We will explore the use of articles in a few different posts.

Lets look at some examples of correct and incorrect uses of articles:

• This is a dog. ?
• This is the dog. ?
• This is dog. ?
• This is "Dog". ? ?(It can be right if "Dog" is someone』s name)
• I want to listen to music. ?
• I want to listen to a music. ?
• I want to listen to the music. ? (specific music that the listener or reader is aware of or understands the reference).
• The water is cold. ?
• A water is cold ?
• Water is cold. ?

Although both these sentences make sense grammatically, the meaning can be very different.

• I was walking down a street. (it doesn』t really matter which street).
• I was walking down the street. (it could be that the street is an important part of the story).

A funny test

You can test yourselves and decide whether the following examples are correct or incorrect and comment below with your answers.

Please leave a comment saying whether the apple examples are correct or incorrect (Y = correct, N = incorrect). I will share the answers in my next article.

• I want to eat apple.
• I want to eat an apple.
• I want to eat apples.
• I want to eat more apple.
• I want to eat more an apple.
• I want to eat more apples.

(偷看答案)

Goodbye! Until next time!

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栗子的知乎答案索引：栗子樹

栗子的微信公眾號：E-Speller 或者 栗子英文 （只有精彩的原創）

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