The Indefinite Articles

This lesson is all about the indefinite articles to indefinite articles in English namely a and an we use an when the word that follows the indefinite article starts with a vowel sound and all other cases.

We use A as the indefinite article when we use the indefinite article to identify a person or a thing that is unspecific or generic.

And indefinite articles are only used before singular nouns as we said we use an when the word that follows starts with a vowel sound and notes as we said vowel sound and not vowel is not a vowel sound.

We use a So we would have an elephant but a big elephant that is not the noun after it is really the word after it and we only say an elephant just to make it flow easier when we speak to say a elephant.

It would be very sort of strange and awkward to say an S M S because although S M S starts with a consonant it has a vowel sound a hotel and our here we see they both start with an H but in hotel the word has as it were harder H to it.

And in our he’s got a vowel sound to it.

So as a K hotel and our and here we’ve marked this with a question mark and marked as UK, US an ing in UK English they would pronounce that word Herb presumably because there’s an H at the start of it.

So if it was an English speaker there was say a herb but for some reason the Americans call it a verb and they would say an herb. we use indefinite articles to identify a person or a thing that is unspecific or generic it’s dark in here.

Can you turn on a light.

I don’t really care which light I’m not bothered but in any light I’ll do not a specific light.

I’m still waiting for an answer.

I don’t know what the answer is.

I’m waiting for it.

There’s an angry customer wanting to speak to the manager.

Now here we have indefinite and definite articles.

There’s an angry customer is indefinite.

We don’t really know who it is or what their problem is.

But he wants.

They want to speak to the manager and in that shop there’s presumably only one manager.

I’ll take a message for you.

I just need to find a pen so I don’t know what the message is is unspecified and I don’t care which pen.

It’s generic.

So who have a sentence with both cases.

I mean this indefinite article for jobs nationalities and religions.

Sam is a doctor Peter is an electrician and he was the electrician starts with a vowel sound.

So we use an electrician

Pia is a Frenchman an Englishman’s home is his castle sister Mary is a Catholic nun.

Christianity is an Abrahamic religion as is Islam and we also use the indefinite article instead of the number one if we wanted to we could use the number one as well it would also be correct differences at the market you might say I’d like a pound of apples and four lemons you could equally as well say I’d like one pound of apples and four lemons this recipe is very sweet it needs a kilo of sugar I’m in a hurry I can only stay for a minute and this last example for a minute we don’t mean literally 60 seconds we just mean a short while.