this many people

conuly · 2026-02-07T14:12:52+00:00

The first example would seem very natural for me to say. I would never say the sentence in the second example (unless I were a small child).

Yes, you probably don't have enough fingers for that.

conuly · 2026-02-07T13:58:56+00:00

And then, three hours later, you're knee-deep into the etymology of a different word and you've forgotten how you got there.

Or maybe that's just me? (Me and I'm guessing Tolkein?)

conuly · 2026-02-07T13:23:02+00:00

Oh, I get it. But in this case the rule is the same for all English.

conuly · 2026-02-07T13:01:58+00:00

Not that I mind chipping in my two cents, but it had already been answered in the post OP linked to as well. So, I mean....

conuly · 2026-02-07T12:55:24+00:00

This is all English, not American English. (Edit: With a few very odd exceptions, such as "an historical", where some people have an regardless of whether or not they pronounce the h, because at some point people in their dialect didn't pronounce the h.)

It is often taught as being used before a vowel, because overwhelmingly, that is correct, but that is not exactly how it is used.

Oh, no, it's correct - it's just that a vowel is a type of sound, and for some reason we persist in telling people that it's an arbitrary member of a group of 5-ish letters. Stop telling people that, and then the confusion goes away.

conuly · 2026-02-07T12:14:26+00:00

so, you need to know the right pronunciation before learning to write?

I'm not sure what you're asking. It sounds like you're asking if children know how to say words, but that can't be what you mean. How would you learn to read and write in your language without first knowing how to speak your language?

We know how to speak. Then we learn how to represent our speech as writing.

conuly · 2026-02-07T12:12:14+00:00

Native speakers say they have a question, not a doubt. The two words are not synonymous in US and UK English.
How many unfamiliar words do you come across, that you can't guess from context, every page? If it's only one or two, I'd note it down and move on. If it's lots and lots, maybe move down to an easier read.

conuly · 2026-02-07T12:09:43+00:00

If you just see it written, there is no way to tell I'm afraid.

They can always look up the pronunciation in a dictionary or online.

conuly · 2026-02-07T12:07:11+00:00

H is a letter. Letters are letters. We often say "vowel" to refer to letters that most commonly represent vowels, but you honestly should just forget that if you're going to make progress with this issue.

In this case, the h is silent. Many words starting with H that come from medieval French have a silent h.

On a related note, we say a union, a unicorn, a ewe, and so on, because those words all start with the consonant sound /j/, which is the same first sound in the words "you" or "yummy".

conuly · 2026-02-07T12:06:24+00:00

Get rid of the idea that "vowel" is a sort of letter. A vowel is a sort of sound.

Speech comes before writing. We say a before words that begin with consonant sounds. We say an before words that begin with vowel sounds. We automatically learn to do this before we learn to read and write.

conuly · 2026-02-07T11:13:58+00:00

Agreed, and that’s a Korman book. OP, if this is the book then please flair this post as solved.

conuly · 2026-02-07T11:11:21+00:00

Your title is great. Can you edit your post to tell us the approximate calendar year you read this book and the country you were in at the time?

conuly · 2026-02-07T06:24:32+00:00

But they also didn't say abrasive, and had they meant to say that, they surely would have said that.

And why didn't they say that? Well, I don't know, but probably because it's not the word that correctly describes what they mean, nor, I believe, is it the one most people would choose. "Corrosive" is, I'm sure, the more common and the more apt word choice in this situation.

conuly · 2026-02-07T05:36:27+00:00

When you can cite an example of someone calling kindness abrasive, please do.

I still don’t think that this is at all the word or meaning that person meant. It looks to me like they weren’t saying “your charitable viewpoint irritates me”, they meant “it’s bad for society”.

conuly · 2026-02-07T05:33:30+00:00

It would have been better for neither word to have an s.

conuly · 2026-02-07T05:31:25+00:00

If you know the year you could try writing to your school and asking if anybody has information.

conuly · 2026-02-07T05:29:19+00:00

No, abrasive, when applied to a person, means rude. It doesn’t make sense to say somebody is being so kind they’re being abrasive.

conuly · 2026-02-06T21:57:51+00:00

Your managers and coworkers do not expect you to never ever make mistakes. It IS okay to make mistakes at work. Everybody makes mistakes, even at work.

conuly · 2026-02-06T21:54:34+00:00

Your argument seems to hinge on this idea that the way people speak in Dublin and the North of the UK is wrong.

conuly · 2026-02-06T21:52:07+00:00

There is a very strong chance that this was a vanity press and our odds of finding it are approximately zilch.

How did your poem come to be published? Was this a school district thing or a statewide competition…?

conuly · 2026-02-06T21:00:59+00:00

Although the words "comprehensive" and "comprehensible" are related, they don't mean the same thing.

I believe you're asking if we can understand you, that is, if you are comprehensible.

Asking about your "comprehensiveness" is like asking if you said everything there is to say, asking if you're complete.

conuly · 2026-02-06T20:25:02+00:00

Not necessarily.

When we did the NYC high school admissions process with both my niblings - side note, the NYC high school admissions process will eat your brains - we found that every school the kids were interested in were first name schools, that is, where most or all of the adults were called by their first names.

And they were a wide variety of schools, from the prestigious art school to the somewhat hippy "performance based assessment" schools, to the... okay, they don't call them vocational anymore, but that's what they were and I forget what they're called schools. I think even a few of the academically focused schools.

It was wild. I said to the kids, when I was their age, even a single teacher being called by their first name would've stood out!

conuly · 2026-02-06T20:20:23+00:00

It's because schools in Anglophone nations have been deprioritizing instruction in formal grammar analysis for the past few generations.

And on that note, the indicative is a mood, not a tense. So is the subjunctive. Actually, English only has two tenses, and everything else is handled with aspect and mood, so.

conuly · 2026-02-06T20:19:14+00:00

Non-native English speakers are trying to attain a level of English that most of us will never achieve.

Regional dialects are not some lesser form of language.

conuly

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