English Thread

In this thread, we attempt to learn to read, write, and speak English, a language which would be very useful to know. It is widely spoken throughout the world.

Do you speak English? Are you fluent? What resources did you use to learn? Can you give some examples in this thread? Posts some useful links.

Let's help each other out and learn a new language.

>>207
When speaking or writing as though speaking, it's common to omit articles. "Sorry, typo" is acceptable, for example. You could just as easily say "Sorry, that was a typo", but it's not necessary.

>>208
It sounds like the church has been mentioned before, and there is a specific church.

For example,
"In a town there were many churches. One of the churches had a leaky roof. Some workmen went to the church to repair the roof, but they found it was impossible to repair without materials from the neighboring town 3 miles away."

This is fine. In this case, we cannot change the "a" before "leaky roof" (because we are specifying the roof) and we also cannot change the "the" before "roof" or "church"(because we have already specified the roof and the church and it makes no sense to speak generally).

Now, if you were setting up a story, like so:

"Some workmen went to a church to repair the roof. It had needed repair work for some time, so the pastor was very glad to finally get the work done."

It makes more sense to use "a" before "church" because we are establishing the scene. We cannot use "the" before "church" unless there is only one church we could possibly be talking about. Perhaps the people in this town know there is only one church, in which case this makes sense. Otherwise, it sounds strange.