Countable and Uncountable Nouns
Objectives of today’s lesson:
In this lesson, Learn English with Julia presents to you “Countable and Uncountable Nouns”, in order for you to be able to answer the following questions:
- What is Countable and Uncountable sets?
- Can we use his with uncountable nouns?
- Are Uncountable Nouns singular or plural?
- Is luggage an Uncountable Noun?
Video Script:
hi and welcome to this video on the countable and uncountable nouns
This is one of the main divisions of nouns you might have already heard of common and proper nouns.
Well this is yet another division for the noun or noun division
What does a countable noun mean?
Generally it’s a noun, it’s the name of something when it can be separated
so we’ll use it for objects, for people, for ideas. They can be separated. Generally that means that there is a singular form and a plural form of these nouns, these countable nouns. So the singular will generally need a determiner before it
So you’d have a person, the person, this person, my friend…
So you would need a determiner before it and the plural, that would mean that you could count them: one person, two people, three people, five friends and so on…
Various examples here:
we have the example of a friend
so this is a countable noun because we can find it in a plural form and we can separate them
so we can also have one two three different friends
as you can use lots of
different determiners basically in front of it
that’s what makes it countable
you can’t say for example “a money”*
“monies” * “two monies”*
it doesn’t exist
so that would lead us to this second column of uncountable nouns
so names of things, names of substances, concepts, materials,
So they all considered mass nouns. You can’t separate them.
It’s just one big block of something.
So it could be “the weather”: we can’t say “a weather”* “weathers”*
You would say “weather”
and you could say “advice”
His advice was good.
But you can’t say: “His advices were good”*
That doesn’t work, it doesn’t exist.
music, sound, and so on…
All those are uncountable nouns. So they can’t be divided – that’s very important.
Generally they’re considered to be
singular with no plural
although you can’t place “a” or “an” before
“a weather”* “an advice”*
You can’t do that.
You would make sure that the verb was in the singular form.
So: “the weather is good”
“his advice was good”
“this music is pleasant” and so on.
The ideas, the concepts are quite simple.
It’s generally when we start to use quantifiers (all these words here in purple)
when we tend to use quantifiers mistakes do come up.
So when do we use quantifiers?
We use them when we want to focus on numbers, on quantities.
These here only work with countable nouns.
So you could say:
“few people”, “a few people”, “many people”,
“several times” “both days”, “each time”,
“either day”, “fewer people”…
You can use them with lots of different
nouns
So countable nouns could be for example: “coins”.
I had few coins in my hand.
For several days we will stay at this hotel.
We will stay there for several days.
(So that’s countable)
Seasons and so…
Lots of nouns are countable and fewer are actually uncountable.
Uncountable nouns – we’ve seen a few here already.
We can also say that “money” is uncountable.
“time” as a concept is uncountable
“sun”, “rain”: those things are uncountable
And you could use uncountable nouns with these quantifiers here.
So you can say:
“a little rain”, “not much sun”
“a bit of money”, “a great deal of time”
and so on
And then in the middle here, you have a series of quantifiers that can work either with countable or uncountable.
So you could easily say:
“some people” or “some advice”
So it works with both.
all, enough, enough, most, a lot of…
That’s about it!
Thanks for watching!
Grammar Quiz:
Keywords listed in English:
- uncountable nouns
- countable nouns
- common nouns
- proper nouns
- singular or plural
- divisions of nouns
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