Lesson 2: Things and people

Now we talk about things. In English, a few small words come before the name of a thing. They are easy, but they matter.

Nouns

A noun is a word for a person, a place or a thing. “Teacher”, “city” and “book” are nouns.

A, an and the

Use “a” before a consonant sound and “an” before a vowel sound. The vowels are a, e, i, o, u. The consonants are all the other letters.

Listen to the sound, not the letter. Say “a dog” and “an apple”. Say “an hour”, because the h is silent. Say “a university”, because it starts with a “you” sound.

Imagine you ask for a pizza. If you say “a pizza”, any pizza is fine. If you say “the pizza”, you mean one special pizza that we both know.

So we say “I have a car” the first time. Then we say “The car is red”, because now we know which car.

Plurals

Plural means more than one. Most nouns just add -s: “cat, cats”.

After s, sh, ch or x, add -es: “bus, buses” and “box, boxes”. After a consonant and y, change y to -ies: “baby, babies”.

Some plurals are irregular. They do not follow the rule. Learn these five: man, men. Woman, women. Child, children. Foot, feet. Person, people.

This, that, these, those

Use these four words to point at things.

• “This” is one thing near you.
• “That” is one thing far from you.
• “These” is many things near you.
• “Those” is many things far from you.

Say: “This book is new, but that book is old.”

Try it

Choose the right word:

1. I eat ___ apple every day. (a or an)
2. I have a cat. ___ cat is black. (a or the)
3. Write the plural of “child”.

The answers are: an, The, children.

Next time, we will talk about what you do every day: the present simple.