ARTICLES

 

Hello students and teachers!

   Hope you are doing well with your online classes. We don’t know when our schools will reopen. But anyhow we have to continue our studies. So, today we will discuss about articles.     Whenever we study grammar we often compare Hindi and English grammar. But interestingly articles are not found in Hindi.

Articles have nothing to do with vowels and consonants as we generally think. It is only used according to sound and we know that English is not a phonetic language. The students often get confused when they have to use ‘a’ and ‘an’. There are so many words which starts with vowel letter but its pronunciation is consonant and vice-versa. So we have to always take care of pronunciation.

        

Why are articles used?

            Articles are used to show whether we are talking about the things that are known to us (definite) or that are not known to us (indefinite).

a.       We use ‘the’ before a noun to indicate to the listener that we are fairly acquainted with the noun (definite ‘निश्चित ‘).

·         The man I was talking to was my teacher at school.

·         I saw a boy in the playground. The boy was playing cricket. [ In the beginning we don’t know the boy, but in the next sentence it is clear that we are talking about the same boy ]

b.      We use ‘a/an’ when we can’t say which noun we are talking about (indefinite ‘अनिश्चित’).

·         Let me think of a plan.

·         We may spend an evening with her when we are in Dubai.

In short, the is the shortened form of this or that and a/an is the shortened form of any.

So enjoy reading and writing.

Bye! Bye!