• Howdy! Welcome to our community of more than 130.000 members devoted to web hosting. This is a great place to get special offers from web hosts and post your own requests or ads. To start posting sign up here. Cheers! /Peo, FreeWebSpace.net
managed wordpress hosting

grammar help?

kojiro

kojiro

New Member
Which is correct? "an honest person" or "a honest person"

When I was in middle school I was taught that if a vowel comes after then use "an" and if a consonant then "a".

Are there other rules that I am not aware of. I found sites using both.

thanks.
 
Thanks! I could use that too. I say "a uniform" but thought it was correct to write "an uniform". My English has improved. :)
 
must be a topic of the moment I was discussing it with a portugese friend only a couple of days ago

the real hard one is

hotel

a or an could be right/wrong depending if you drop your h's ;)
 
Personally, I pronounce the "h" so I say a hotel. All my friends and classmates say "a hotel" also.

There's also another grammatical concept. Where to say "tha" or "thee" (phonetic pronounciations.) From what I know, you say "thee" when the word after is a vowel, if not it's "tha"
 
Damned English! I never liked it. There's way too many irregular this and that and exceptions....
 
it is getting odd though. I've always used english this way:

an honour
a horror

but in the past year or two I've heard newsreaders use things like:

an horrific accident ...

To me it sounds wrong (and makes it more difficult to pronounce), but I have to presume they are correct. I can see why people who speak another language then try to learn english have so much trouble with it

Greg Moore
 
They say English is the hardest language to learn in the world. Although I do not believe that when it comes to writing (I think Chinese or Japanese is the hardest) in speech, English is probably the hardest.
 
I agree. I thought french was hard at first, but when i really pondered I realized that english has many more "rules" that apply rarely; Not to mention all the figures of speech we use daily without knowing it. Those are enough to make anyone's head spin.
 
Originally posted by Coolin
They say English is the hardest language to learn in the world.
Click to expand...


I know many people who consider english an easy language to learn. OK there are 125,000 words or something which is alot (more than any other language) but most people (mother tounge) only know a fraction I think the average is something like 16-20 thousand (saw that stat many years ago so may be a little out but no too much)

We don't have any of that gender stuff so you don't have to learn that - the rules of the gender of things are different for different languages. most english verb are regular and simple

none of that formal/informal you stuff

plus the huge advantage that so much stuff is in english - film/music/books/internet etc that there is lots of exposure plus you get to use it more - I was in India 6 months ago and most travellers would talk english to each other as a common language. the more you come into contact with something the easier it is.
 
I hear Mandarin Chinese is another tough one. Maybe that's just from english though. At least German, French etc all come from a latin root. Asian languages are a whole new ball game with no historical background at all.

Personally I want to learn Thai so I have an idea of what my future mother-in-law saying about me to her friends :)

Greg Moore
 
Originally posted by lucifer
Originally posted by Coolin
They say English is the hardest language to learn in the world.
Click to expand...
I know many people who consider english an easy language to learn. OK there are 125,000 words or something which is alot (more than any other language) but most people (mother tounge) only know a fraction I think the average is something like 16-20 thousand (saw that stat many years ago so may be a little out but no too much)
Click to expand...

I've always wondered where they came up with the number of words in a language, and how they figured it? Even 125,000 seems like a low number to me. I mean, look how big some of the dictionaries they make are! And since each number has it's own unique name, aren't there essentially an infinite number of words in each language? ;0 heh
 
The best way to find out is to get the thickest dictionary you can find and start counting word by word. I'll pay any one a buck that does this for me.

And no, you cannot cheat. ;)
 
Most dictionaries give you an approximate nuber of definitions contained within. The foot thick dictionary in the local library says it has 80 000 words, and my little pocket one claims 30 000.

A very well educated person usually has a vocabulary of about 30 000 words.
 
Originally posted by Gayowulf
Most dictionaries give you an approximate nuber of definitions contained within. The foot thick dictionary in the local library says it has 80 000 words, and my little pocket one claims 30 000.
Click to expand...
Shhh! I said no cheating! ;)

Anyone I have a pocket dictionary with 60,000 words, so I'm pretty sure the thick ones have much more than 80,000. I'm guessing about 125,000 for the thick ones?
 
mandarin chinese has very few word only a few thousand but they reuse them with different tones so they mean different things. This makes it very hard to learn if you are not a native as you need perfect pitch (being able to tell what note something is when it is heard on it's own) to do it properly. in english we don't need this skill so we loose it (babies have perfect pitch)
 
English is easy to learn but hard to master. Too many rules and too many exceptions to the rules.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top