I think any English speaker could tell you the difference between “the” and “a”. Even if it’s not in their immediate knowledge bank as a fact, they could think of a tiny set of examples and work it out immediately.
I've been teaching the vs. a vs. no particle at all (e.g. 'I go to church') and it's a lot more complicated than you think. There are many edge cases. Native speakers know exactly which one is correct, but cannot always explain why.
I think a really good example of this is adjective precedence. For example, any native speaker immediately knows "wooden nice green big house" is wrong, and they also immediately know that "nice big green wooden house" is the correct ordering. Good luck explaining why.
The adjective closer to noun tends to describe something more like an 'essence' of the noun. Changing the purpose adjective, eg 'savings account' to 'checking account', is more fundamental than changing other kinds of adjectives. The opinion adjectives are the most superficial and most fickle among them.
I haven't tested this extensively enough. Your thoughts and counterexamples welcomed!
A Dutch friend of mine, who speaks great English, tried to impress me by mentioning her musician friend studied at "the conservatory."
She was baffled when I replied that I hadn't heard of The Conservatory before.
It took us minutes to understand she meant a conservatory: they studied at a music school. I agree that it's more complex than native speakers realize.
"The conservatory" is fine in English if the speaker has good reason to assume the listener would know which conservatory was being talked about, no different to any other educational institution. OTOH legal scholars only ever aspire to "the bar" (it's a metonym) and it's only ever "the school of hard knocks".
Of course "school" on its own (or if only qualified by an adjective like "high" or "night" or "law") is unusual because it often sounds unnatural to use an article before it when describing your attendance there.
Eh ... I don't see how that's an different from the common English idiom of saying you went to "the store", which actually always irks me too, since people say it even when it lacks context that would make it definite. If anything, the problem is that she's doing that same thing there.
It's because the alternative is "I went to a store" which only invites unnecessary questions and isn't relevant to the conversation or will become clear so the indicates that, much like ある人 in Japanese means "someone in particular but I'm not going to mention the name because it's pointless to what I'm telling you and it'll just bog us down if I bring it up but it was someone definite", much like the store.
Because if I say "I went to the store" or "I went to the pub" it's somewhere we both go or experience or have an expectation of going or experiencing, no further introduction needed. If we both go to the same conservatory then "the conservatory" would work, no further introduction needed. It doesn't if we don't, it becomes special and therefore needs explanation to introduce to the conversation and take on "the".
> Because if I say "I went to the store" … it's somewhere we both go or experience or have an expectation of going or experiencing,
No, it isn’t. I frequently see native speakers refer to “the store” when that doesn’t hold — hence why it feels like a special case or break from the usual rules.
That’s not the standard your original comment was using (or you’re intentionally moving the goal posts here and abandoned good-faith). Again, to quote with more context:
> I say "I went to the store" or "I went to the pub" it's somewhere we both go or experience or have an expectation of going or experiencing, no further introduction needed. If we both go to the same conservatory then "the conservatory" would work,
Native speakers say “the store” even when there’s no expectation that a) I know which store they mean, or b) I go there myself or will in the future. ie, the standard you use for deciding whether “the” would work in the conservatory example.
Even under your new standard, you should say that “the conservatory” is fine as long as the listener “goes/has gone to conservatories”.
Finally, in case it matters: yes, I have had native speakers (my parents) say “the store” even when I (also a native speaker) didn’t go shopping at all, being too young to do it. (This is why oh-so-clever rhetorical questions should be used with caution.)
Every conversation requires good-faith, charitable interpretation of what others are saying. I don't know how to interpret your remark, in its original context, as good faith. I said nothing that could reasonably be interpreted as requiring that native speakers "not go shopping". If you were actually interested in a meaningful exchange of ideas, you would have given a more substantive reply than that one.
I agree that if you're not going to take the discussion seriously, you probably shouldn't join it -- it just makes HN worse. Strawman argumentation doesn't suddenly become okay just because "hey man, we were just discussing grammar and its colloquial use", as if it's somehow okay to deliberately misinterpret someone and waste their time in that case.
I'll finish up on the objections here as I don't wish to continue the conversation they come from but do wish to clear them up.
> Native speakers say “the store” even when there’s no expectation that a) I know which store they mean,
The other person doesn't need to know, it's acting like a specific place has been introduced without it being introduced because to specifically introduce it is wasteful.
> or b) I go there myself or will in the future. ie, the standard you use for deciding whether “the” would work in the conservatory example.
Everyone except the terminal and imminent misfortune will go shopping to the kind of shop "the" will be put in front of. If you were a musician and said "when I went to the conservatory" I wouldn't blink either.
> Even under your new standard, you should say that “the conservatory” is fine as long as the listener “goes/has gone to conservatories”.
It may well be, and it still fits with what I described, and expected shared experience that is assumed to need no further introduction for the rest of what is about to be told.
> Finally, in case it matters: yes, I have had native speakers (my parents) say “the store” even when I (also a native speaker) didn’t go shopping at all, being too young to do it.
You have been or will go shopping in your life, and you know or will come to know what they are referring to. Older people will often use language to youngsters that youngsters do not fully understand yet. It helps the youngsters come to understand it.
> (This is why oh-so-clever rhetorical questions should be used with caution.)
Because they point out the stupidity of a response and may invite further stupidity in response? Yes, that is a downside.
>>Native speakers say “the store” even when there’s no expectation that a) I know which store they mean,
>The other person doesn't need to know, it's acting like a specific place has been introduced without it being introduced because to specifically introduce it is wasteful.
That was in response to the reply where you said:
>I say "I went to the store" or "I went to the pub" it's somewhere we both go or experience or have an expectation of going or experiencing, no further introduction needed. If we both go to the same conservatory then "the conservatory" would work,
In other words, I only brought that up, because you were saying it falls under a case where both people know which one it refers to. If you weren't using that defense, you shouldn't have replied here.
>>Even under your new standard, you should say that “the conservatory” is fine as long as the listener “goes/has gone to conservatories”.
>It may well be, and it still fits with what I described, and expected shared experience that is assumed to need no further introduction for the rest of what is about to be told.
Great, but there you're definitely diverging from native speaker usage (as illustrated from the original comment [1]) -- native speakers do not otherwise use "the" for such cases, and would agree you shouldn't say "the conservatory" in that case just because the listener has also gone to a conservatory.
>You have been or will go shopping in your life, and you know or will come to know what they are referring to. Older people will often use language to youngsters that youngsters do not fully understand yet. It helps the youngsters come to understand it.
True, but irrelevant to the issue at at hand. Here you were claiming that it's fine because it's expected that the listener has already shopped at that store. If you want to switch to "well, they're going to model how other people would treat the store's definiteness" that is a different reason for making the noun definite here, which would still make this case different and break the usual pattern of when a noun is made definite.
>>(This is why oh-so-clever rhetorical questions should be used with caution.)
>Because they point out the stupidity of a response and may invite further stupidity in response? Yes, that is a downside.
Any stupidity it pointed out was on your own side -- you were absolutely incredulous at the idea that there might be a native speaker that never goes shopping. Haha! Point for you! What a dumb argument! Now everyone will see the light because you have pointed out a clear absurdity in the other person's position!
Except ... such people (non-shoppers) do exist. Which means, not only did you make a demonstrably false assumption, you were calling the other person stupid despite being correct, and adding one more layer of correction that has to be resolved before the discussion can continue.
Yeah -- that counts as a reason to be cautious of that technique.
I feel like this has something to do with whether the identity of the thing is central to the story or incidental.
"On my last vacation I went to the beach to work on my tan." vs "on my last vacation I went to a beach to work on my tan". "The beach" feels like I went to a specific beach on purpose (or that there was only one), while "a beach" feels like I just picked one at random.
"On my way here I stopped at the store to get an apple" vs "On my way here I stopped at a store to get an apple". Similarly, "the store" implies intentionality/singularity, while "a store" implies I happened upon it.
Really? "The" is used when the listener knows which one you're talking about, or if there's only one. "A" is used when it's not known or not important which specific one you're referring to. What's an example that deviates from that framework?
[edit] "I go to Church" works because Church is a proper noun when used in that sentence (and it's only used as a proper noun by devout Christians). Properly they mean "I go to [the/a] church", and the reason they leave out the particle is that they mean "THE CHURCH" but they want to sound humble, so they can't say that; but they also can't say "I go to a church," because that would be denying that the church they go to is the One True Church. That's why they don't use a particle in that particular phrase. The proper particle is "a", and "church" shouldn't be capitalized.
[edit2] this is not an attempt to start a religious flame war. I'm just commenting on the grammar.
[edit3] Just to demonstrate the proper noun thing I'm referring to, Jews "go to Temple" (capitalized, proper noun), or go to a temple, but they don't "go to temple".
It isn't that simple, unfortunately for learners of English. One example would be "Shall we go to the pub?" (British usage at least): No specific pub is intended, so a learner would expect 'a pub'. The only sure-fire way to grasp the subtleties of articles (or lack thereof in phrases like "go to school") in English is via immersion, as any rule system is going to fall foul of idiomatic exceptions. To bring this back to Japanese, I feel the same about 'wa' vs 'ga', it's best just to develop a feel for the distiction.
“I went to THE post office”, “I went to THE train station”. These are typically used without context, and are exceptions that confuse learners, particularly those who are learning about articles for the first time.
Regarding “I go to Church”, the verb to go here doesn’t actually mean movement, it’s a euphemism for “I worship”. Same with “temple”. If you say “I go to a/the church” you are actually stating movement towards a definite or indefinite place.
Again, these are challenging subtleties for language speakers where all nouns are conceptual. And most native speakers can’t explain these exceptions spontaneously
> "I go to Church" works because Church is a proper noun when used in that sentence (and it's only used as a proper noun by devout Christians).
You're definitely wrong here, because "I go to school" and "I go to work" are equally grammatical statements, and there is no way to construe those as involving proper nouns. You can also see this construction with words like bed or the various mealtimes.
The commonality I can derive from these various examples is something along the lines of "state of being," although I find that a poor descriptor. This kind of formation is limited to relatively few locations (you can't say "I go to mall" for example), but for everything I can think up, you can also use the word sans determiner in other circumstances ("College has gotten expensive as of late," for example).
If you try to translate from one language with a definite/indefinite article distinction to another (say English to German or Spanish), you'll notice that in many edge cases, one language uses a different article than the other (or one of them uses no article, while the other does).
The "I go to Church" example, is a case in point. In both German and Spanish, a definite article is required.
That shows that, while there is a systematic difference between "a" and "the", it breaks down in many edge cases.
As a native speaker of English, I didn't know about mass nouns until I was an adult and I was trying to explain to a non-native speaker that they were using "the" too much.
Then you have “I go home”, which drops not only “the” but “to”. Religious in nature? No.
This was some truly bizarre reasoning based off one example and it has zero actual foundation in language. One of the strangest comments I’ve ever seen on HN.
True. Currently I'm in the stage of writing my thesis. Grammar is hard. I know and learnt about the vs a vs no particle but I'm still struggling when to use any of them.
I dunno - there after plenty of cases we use "the" despite it not referring to a known single instance of something. "The thing is..." or "what's the matter" or even "I've got the flu". Good luck trying to explain to Japanese speakers especially why "a dinner" or "go to a hospital" don't sound natural but "I'll have a beer" or "a few friends" are fine. And why is it "once upon a time" but "most of the time"...
