Using English articles

Audio: 5 min. 20 sec.

One of the biggest difficulties many students face when learning English are these three words: A, AN and THE, otherwise known as ARTICLES. 

When to use A, AN and THE?

For Europeans and Central or South Americans, the issue is that the way these words are used is completely different than in your language.

For students in Asia or Africa, you most likely do not have these words in your native language, so they are a new idea for you to learn.

Let’s take a look at how we use articles in English and the tricky points about them!

Why use articles?

All sentences contain nouns, whether they be people, places or objects.

Some nouns are countable, meaning that they can be singular (pen) or plural (pens).

Other nouns are uncountable, and that means that they are something that cannot be easily measured or separated, like coffee or sand.

When a noun is in a sentence, we use articles to clearly identify the noun and its importance.

When we have multiple nouns in a conversation or text, the use of articles helps us to understand which noun we are specifically talking about, which nouns are more important than others and if the noun is one of many (such as AN APPLE or A DOG) or a certain noun that we know (THE MAN over there or THE COMPUTER on the table).

What's the difference between the articles?

A and AN are called indefinite articles, and we use them when we are talking about a countable noun that is general, meaning that we do not have a specific noun in mind.

For example:
“I would like to eat A sandwich.” This is a general idea and not a specific sandwich.

We use A if the noun starts with a consonant sound (Cat, Restaurant, Television), and we use AN if the noun starts with a vowel sound (Egg, Actress, Octopus).

Be careful here because the important part is the SOUND, not the letter. So, with X-RAY, we would say AN X-ray. With UNIVERSITY, we would say A university.

We often use indefinite articles when we are introducing a noun for the first time.
“Today, I saw A dog.”

We do not use indefinite articles with plural nouns or uncountable nouns.

THE is called a DEFINITE article, and that is because it is used to highlight a specific noun in a sentence, one that is known and/or understood by the other person.

“Can you give me THE book you are holding?”

“He is at THE library.”

When we use a definite article, the noun it is connected to is usually more important than normal.

It is common to use the definite article after introducing a noun in a previous sentence.

If we take the example from before:

“Today, I saw A dog. The dog was cute and friendly.”

We can use definite articles with all nouns: singular, plural and uncountable.

However, it is not common to use definite articles when we mention proper nouns or names. 

What are some common mistakes?

For people who speak a Latin or European language: You should be careful about using definite articles.

In your languages it can be common to use THE even when talking about something in general, but we do not do this in English.  

For example, when you want to talk about people or society, you should not use any article because these tend to be general topics.  

You can only use THE if you are being specific about a certain type of people.

“The people are loud.” – Incorrect

“The people who are outside are loud.” – Correct

For people who speak an Asian language or a language that doesn’t have articles, a very common mistake is related to job titles or positions.

When you talk about what kind of job someone has, we usually use an indefinite article because we are speaking generally.

“She is A doctor”

“I used to be AN actor.”

If the job is the only position of its kind within a company or business, we use a definite article.

“Tim Cook is THE CEO of Apple.”

With superlatives (biggest, best, most interesting), we usually use a definite article. So, THE best, THE biggest, THE most interesting, and so on.

However, if you are talking about something that belongs to you or someone else, you shouldn’t use the article.

For example, MY best friend, HIS biggest problem, THEIR most interesting idea.

There is more to know about articles but hopefully this serves as a small summary to help you understand the basics.

Check back in the future for another blog post about the more difficult parts of articles and special exceptions to how they are used!