手把手教你学口语12

Welcome to Daily Tips on Learning English. Today’s tip is on using or omitting the English article “a” correctly.今天的主题是"a"这个冠词的使用

There’s no single rule that explains how to choose whether you should use “a”, use “the” or not use any article at all.

Sometimes there’s only one correct choice, and in other cases, different choices change the meaning of the sentence.

Today let’s discuss the most frequently occurring differences between using the article “a” and using no article.

All English nouns can be divided into two classes: those that are countable¹ and those that are uncountable.也就是可数名词与不可数名词

It is the meaning of a noun as it is used in a sentence which determines whether it is countable or uncountable.

For instance, in the sentence “She has long hair.”, "hair" is uncountable. But in the sentence “There’s a hair in my soup.”,"hair” is countable.

This can create some interesting mistakes. For example, “I like a dog” does not mean 我喜欢狗, that should be “I like dogs.” If you say “I like dog”, that means you like to eat dog meat. If you say “I ate a hamburger”, that means 我吃了一个汉堡, but if you say “I ate hamburger”, that means you ate raw ground beef. 如果你没有使用a hamburger的话，你只有用I ate hamburger少掉了那个a的话，那表示你吃的是碎牛肉

If you say “I ate a cake", that means you ate a whole cake, which is very unlikely. You should have said, “I ate cake”, then it means you ate some cake.

Notice how the use of the article “a” means that the noun it precedes is countable, and therefore you’re talking about a whole one, an entire one. If you omit the article “a”, then it means that you can’t count the noun it precedes, and therefore you are talking about a piece or a quantity or something. So remember to pay careful attention to whether nouns are being used to a countable or uncountable meaning, and be sure to use or omit the article “a” accordingly. This has been today’s daily tip. Tune² in tomorrow for another tip on learning English.

1 countable   

adj.可数的，可以计算的

参考例句：

• The word "person" is a countable noun.person这个词是个可数名词。
• Countable nouns have singular and plural forms.可数名词有单数和复数之分。

2 tune   

n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整

参考例句：

• He'd written a tune,and played it to us on the piano.他写了一段曲子，并在钢琴上弹给我们听。
• The boy beat out a tune on a tin can.那男孩在易拉罐上敲出一首曲子。