By English as a second language, Nouns

Dear Marina, I am glad you care a lot for English plural forms of nouns. You are probably learning English as a Second Language.The noun police is followed by a plural verb because it is a very big group of people. For one Individual, we talk of a Policeman or a policewoman. For the word Family,...

Thank you very much CJ, Zerox, and Carson. You all have given me very valuable advices. After reading through all you said carefully, and then watching a couple of English TV programmes, I believe I can now tell the difference! The ending /z/ in most cases are much shorter, voiced but less...

I don't know what you guys are all on about with devoiced /z/. It's not a devoiced /z/, it's just /s/. In the example that someone above used, "vases"... I don't know about up North or across the pond (either one), but American Standard has that as /s/ in the medial and /z/ in the final. Well, if...

Speaking as a teacher, I get irritated when I see questions like this in an examination. I feel that it is a trick question. I hope it was not in an exam for those learning English as a Second...

Hi Believer, It's my setence, I know, and it sure looks silly without the entire conversation, doesn't it? I have been thinking about this. Another example of how a native speaker just "knows" it - and I'm sure one of the teachers of English as a second language can explain this better. In a...

Hi guysI have no intention to offend anyone, but the article below is the one I found online. Do you believe this is a true story?The use of "the" in terms like "going to hospital/the hospital" is usually ascribed to the influence of Irish English on the American language in the 19th century....

I am one of those people who learned American English as a second language. American English dictionaries never mention anything about a particular noun being countable and uncountable. I learned mass nouns and abstract nouns, both of which are uncountable. I had thought it was up to an...

Many English nouns and noun phrases can be used as adverbs. They are called "adverbial objectives". From the standpoint of word order, an adverbial objective is put as if it were an objective of a verb, but actually it works as an adverbial modifier of the verb. This sort of constructs comes from...

English is a Germanic Language of the Indo-European Family. It is the second most spoken language in the world. It is estimated that there are 300 million native speakers and 300 million who use English as a second language and a further 100 million use it as a foreign language. It is the...