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Hello and welcome. In this lesson, I will teach you the seven rules that you need to know for using articles in English correctly. Articles are the words ‘a’, ‘an’, and ‘the’. There is a final quiz at the end of the lesson for you to test your understanding. OK, the first rule is about where to use ‘a’ and where to use ‘an’. So rule number one is use ‘a’ before a consonant sound, and ‘an’ before a vowel sound. So in all of these words – you see that they start with a consonant sound. Cat starts with /k/, dog starts with /d/, boy with /b/, girl with /g/, house with /h/ and tree with /t/. So we say ‘a cat’, ‘a dog’, ‘a boy’, ‘a girl’, ‘a house’, ‘a tree’ etc. Notice that in natural speech, we don’t say ‘a’, we say ‘uh’ – like ‘a cat’. In this next set of words, you see that, they all start with a vowel sound – apple starts with /ae/, engineer starts with /e/, ice-cream with /ai/, old with /o/, umbrella with /uh/. So we say ‘an apple’, ‘an engineer’, ‘an ice-cream cone’, ‘an old woman’, ‘an umbrella’ and so on. In speech, we don’t say ‘an’, we say /ən/. Let’s do a small exercise. You see ten items on the screen. For each one, I want you to say if you would use ‘a’ or ‘an’ before it. Stop the video, think about it, then play the video again and check. OK here are the answers. Did you get them all right? I want to focus on items number seven to ten because these are a little tricky. Number seven is ‘a university’ because even though ‘university’ starts with the letter ‘u’ the first sound of the word is not a vowel sound. We don’t say /ooniversity/. We say /yoo-nə- vər-si-ty/ so that first sound is a /y/ sound, which is a consonant sound, so we say ‘a university.’ Number eight is similar. The word ‘European’ starts with a /y/ sound, so ‘a European tour.’ In number nine, the spelling has an ‘h’ at the start but that ‘h’ is silent. We don’t say /hau-ər/, we say /au-ər/. The first sound is an /au/ sound which is a vowel sound, so this is ‘an hour’. In the same way, in number ten, we say MA. ‘M’ starts with an /e/ sound which is again a vowel sound, so ‘an MA in English’. OK let’s move on to rule number two: Use ‘a’ and ‘an’ ONLY with singular, countable nouns. We say that a noun is countable if we can count it – one, two, three, four etc. All of these words on the screen are countable. We can say one elephant, three cars, ten teachers, five hundred onions and so on. Now if you talk about one person or thing, like one elephant or one car, then that’s called a singular noun and if you say ten teachers or five hundred onions, those are called plural nouns. Uncountable nouns cannot be counted in this way. Nouns like water, sugar, milk, love, anger, knowledge are some examples. If you think about it, you cannot say “I drank four waters” or “I want eight milks”. To a person, you can say “I love you” but you can’t say “I have five loves for you” – that doesn’t make any sense. So these are all uncountable. Alright, so the rule is - you can only use ‘a’ and ‘an’...