It is confusing for me to distinguish these two kinds of words. 'Milk' is able to count, isn't it? yes.. How about 'paper'? Is it an uncountable word? We can see how MANY PAPERS there are on a disk as a countable word, but we have to say how MUCH PAPER there is. The reason why I confuse to choose either one word is the difference of expression of language from Japanese one. In my country, Japan, every single word has a countable way to make sure it is a thing or an animal, or how big or how shape it is. Therefore, we can count for one paper, two papers, three papers, and so on, or one house, two houses, and three houses.
Probably, my brain might work in Japanese even though I don't realize that. Is increasing my English vocabulary the best solution to conquer my problem in wiring ? If you have any suggestions to prevent from the problem, let me know.... Oh, is the word 'suggestion' coutable or uncountable?
thanks.
-MASA
3 comments:
Countable vs. uncountable: there are some general categories of words that tend to be uncountable (foods, liquids/semisolids, materials, weather, etc) but there are lots exceptions. If you're in an ELI structure class, there is a chapter that deals with nouns and has some general guidelines.
But yeah, it's hard, and requires memorization.
Suggestions are countable, by the way. :)
I' ve heard that Asian languages have no articles. Before I came to the ELI I haven' t known that.
However, I' m soooo glad that there is only the articel "the" in English. You should be happy not to learn German. We have 3 different articles, so you have to learn the articel to every single noun. We also have uncountable nouns and by the way there exist a variety of different articles for nouns used as an object.
I know, that doesn' t help you in any way and perhaps I also make many mistakes with grammer, if not with articles then with other things.
I' m sure Japanese is also very difficult to learn!
I still confuse about the articles, because as you know(as Renate mentioned right above), we don't usually put articles in Asia language, also in Korea as well.
However, I think the only thing we have to do is to be used to the 'ARTICLES' in English sentences.
From more practices and learning, I believe we can go through this difficulty !
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