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Recently I noticed that one of my foreign friends who is studying English is struggling with the usage of "the". An example of a mistake she makes is "I like to study the English too because it is fun!". I told her she could omit the "the" but I wasn't exactly able to explain why.

Her reasoning is that the noun 'English' is a specific subject she is stating she enjoys which is why she puts "the" before it.

Can someone explain this case and if there is perhaps an English rule she can follow to know when to use "the"?

Rand al'Thor
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Anthony
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    Alas, your friend has had the "meaning" of articles explained to them, and apparently they believe it. This is all nonsense. Articles have no meaning, and they are never used with proper names unless they are titles (or part of the name, like The Hague). There are, instead, several hundred small rules for different situations that have nothing to do with one another. Articles are something that can be used with any noun, and mostly they don't matter semantically. So the natural result is that they get used as color codes to distinguish little things in little contexts. – John Lawler May 26 '16 at 17:44
  • What @John said. One of those "small rules" being that if you include an article in I am listening to [a/an] German / Italian / Thai / etc. you mean you're listening to an individual person of that nationality speaking (as opposed to generically listening to speech in that language). And you just have to learn that you can't do that with [a/an] French / English / Spanish / etc. – FumbleFingers May 26 '16 at 18:39
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    @FumbleFingers: I believe that your comment is entirely about the fact that there are words (nouns) Englishman, Frenchman, and Spaniard, but the corresponding words for some other nationalities just happen to be the same as the adjective for the nationality (or the noun for the language); there are no such words as Germanman, Itailianman, etc.  And therefore, I believe that your comment *isn't* really about articles. – Scott - Слава Україні May 26 '16 at 20:58
  • @Anthony: You might want to ask your friend if she understands why "I am talking to the man" is correct, but "I am talking to the Anthony" is not. – Scott - Слава Україні May 26 '16 at 21:01
  • @Scott: The primary content of my comment notes the difference between German / Italian / Thai / etc. with or without the indefinite article. The fact that there are a few "nationality" terms that don't fit this rule is just a minor additional point I thought I might as well add. – FumbleFingers May 27 '16 at 12:53
  • "I am talking to the Anthony" is perfectly correct, it just doesn't mean the same thing as "I am talking to Anthony". Likewise, "I like to study the English" is perfectly fine, it's just that it means "I like to study the people of England", which is not at all what the friend is trying to say. – RegDwigнt Jun 30 '16 at 09:40
  • Reg - your second sentence is fine, but your first one is not. "I am talking to the Anthony" has a different meaning to "I am talking to Anthony" - that stress on a specific Anthony is very definite. – Rory Alsop Jun 30 '16 at 10:07

1 Answers1

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"I like to study the English too because it is fun!"

Correct if "the English" means "the people, culture, or history of England", or "the interesting or peculiar way some speaker, author, or group uses the English language", or "the athletic sporting technique of body English".

Mostly incorrect, excepting for if "the English" is short for "the English textbook I'm assigned", (supposing group of students is discussing the merits of a stack of their various classroom textbooks), as here "English" would be an adjective, (describing the noun book), that's momentarily promoted to a noun. Outside of such a bookish context, this usage would be as incorrect as starting with "I like the French Fries with ketchup", and abbreviating it to "I like the French with ketchup".

Incorrect if "the English" means which kind of classroom schooling one prefers -- here English is used in the most abstract sense possible, and such usage therefore lacks the sort of distinctive attributes that require using an article; in other words, it's a one-of-a-kind object, there is only one "English" in the universe.

Articles distinguish between available quantities of generally non-unique objects. The article "A" means one among many, the article "The" means the only one of a specific or particular object that's at hand or currently exists, and no article is reserved for unique abstractions.

agc
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  • Not really sure what you're getting at with your "mostly incorrect" part of the answer - who abbreviates noun-adjective pairs with just the adjective? That seems more like totally incorrect to me; someone who said they like the French with ketchup would be unintelligible. – Nuclear Hoagie Jun 30 '16 at 19:19
  • @Matt, tweaked 2nd para to make the distinctions clearer. Re adjective-noun pairs: consider "Off to sip a glass on the green." Most likely we understand that the drinker is not sipping molten silica, nor sitting in pea soup or algae, because the leading articles (a glass, the green) promote adjectives to stand for their absent nouns. – agc Jun 30 '16 at 20:40
  • Then again perhaps another problem is cultural context. Is there an assigned US English textbook, that passed through our sullen gauntlets of state committees and buyers, that's actually fun to read? Hard to imagine -- nowadays. And yet, I own a wooden-bound English reader from about 180 years ago, (pre-international copyright, we'd call those excerpts "bootlegs" now), full of thoughtful things, plus death, gore, and racy bits, which is (and would have been) fun to read. – agc Jun 30 '16 at 20:59