A, An, The: The English Article, Finally Explained

Three questions decide most articles in the language. Can you count the noun? Does your listener already know which one you mean? Are you talking about the whole class of thing rather than one of them? Those three settle perhaps eighty per cent of every article anybody writes. This book asks them in Part 1 and then spends five more parts on the rest: the four reasons a noun becomes definite, the zero article where speakers of Romance, Slavic and Semitic languages lose the most sentences, the fixed phrases that follow no rule at all, the place names, and the twenty cases where both versions are correct English and mean different things.

Every situation is given as the right phrase, the reason, an example sentence, and the version you were about to write. In hospital and in the hospital. A few and few. The Netherlands and Netherlands.

With a list of uncountable nouns and a one-page decision procedure at the back. For anyone whose first language has no articles, and for anyone whose English is otherwise fluent and still gives them away.