Dear all,
i am just learning a memrize created course: “400 words of TOEFL intermediate English” It is really annoying that the author (course created by memrise team) uses sometimes and article with the substantives and sometimes not. There is no rule behind it. I have to learn additionally if i need to put an article in front of the word or not.
Has anyone the same problem? Could the memrize author fix this bug?
kind regards
Karsten
Yess, sometimes it is used used an “a” in front of the nouns and sometimes not.
@timmitaler ~ Okay, hopefully someone from the Memrise staff can respond to your post now that they know the name of the course.
@Lien ~ can you please shed some light on this issue.
Thanks.
Just skimmed through that course, and it seems to me that it’s almost consistent - nearly every noun representing a thing (or person) rather than a concept has an article, and other words (such as the many that aren’t nouns) don’t have articles. So there is a rule behind it, that makes sense.
However, I did run across a few inconsistencies.
For example, “one who does not believe in the existence of god” is given as “atheist”, but based on the way that definition is written, it should be “an atheist” to be consistent with the rest of the course. Though if there are attributes in the course and this word is marked “adjective” then it’s fine as is; I didn’t start taking the course so I don’t know if it shows attributes.
Another one I ran across is “a strong fear mixed with disgust”, which is given as “a horror”. This one should not have an article if it were to be consistent with the rest of the course, or it should at least allow the answer without an article (“horror”) as an alt. Maybe it does allow it as an alt? I’m not sure.
So, overall, I think the course is okay, but it does have some specific issues with specific words. It would help of you reported those specific problems, picking out the particular words that don’t seem to fit the way the course uses articles overall.
HI Cos,
thanks for the reply. As German native I don’t understand the whole differentiation between concept and not a concept. It is really complicated and does not help at all. Sometimes you have a noun which is “concept” and thing in one meaning. Why don’t you eleminate all the articles and done.
Here some examples which do not fit in my opinion. And i only scrolled two levels:
an impact = a strong influence (concept…)
combustion =burning (no concept…)
kind regards
Karsten
@cos: “nouns representing things” vs “nouns representing concepts” - but you don’t mean concrete vs abstract, as you categorise “horror” as “thing” and not “concept”?
what is your point exactly, that consistence in that course comes from: nouns representing persons have an “a, an”, and nouns not representing persons don’t have “a, an”?
I would quit that course, and look for one with an active creator
The example you give actually illustrates something about this…
Having a strong influence on something would normally be said as “having an impact on” something; “having impact on” something sounds awkward and not like good English. So it makes sense, I think, to include the article there and have you learn that this is actually how you would say it, to mean what the definition means.
On the other hand, burning = combustion. Combustion doesn’t take an article (well, there are rare cases where you might use it with an article, but that’s probably out of scope for a basic course like this, and like I said, rare). I don’t remember the right term for it, but it’s like a collective noun. For example, people can and often do talk about having “many impacts”, but you wouldn’t talk about “several combustions”. So the distinction between these two is real, and learning that one of them uses an article and the other doesn’t is actually meaningful.
Overall I do think this course looks like it makes sense in where it does and doesn’t use articles, and that it would be useful for you to learn which words are used with an article. Where you don’t understand why, or are confused, you can post here, and someone can explain. And in some cases, you may find a mistake in the course, or a sloppy mis-use of an article - most courses have some problems like that with individual items. Report those, like you would for any other course, when you run across them; say specifically which word is troubling you and you can find out if there’s a reason for it that you didn’t understand, or whether the course just has a mistake.