Articles in English - 5 Levels of Difficulty

Hi, I’m Molly. Welcome to Oxford  Online English! In this lesson, you can test your ability to use  articles: ‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’.

Here’s how this lesson works. There are five levels. Each level is  more difficult than the previous one.

Level one is beginner. Levels two to four are intermediate. Level five  is high intermediate to advanced.

If you’re not a beginner, start at level two! At each level, you can see what you need  to focus on if you have difficulties.

Got it? Let’s start with level one.

Look at five sentences. Each  sentence has a gap. You can put ‘a’, ‘an’, ‘the’ or nothing in the gap. Pause the video and find your answers now!

Ready? Let’s see the answers together. Use ‘a’ or ‘an’ after ‘there is’,  when you’re talking about *one* thing.

Use ‘a’ or ‘an’ to say what someone  is, for example to say someone’s job. Remember that you *can’t* use ‘a’ or  ‘an’ with a plural noun. Use nothing.

Don’t use ‘a’ or ‘the’ to talk about things in  general. If you say ‘I like strawberries’, you mean that you like *all* strawberries, in general. Use ‘a’ or ‘an’ to mean ‘one of many’. This is a common way to use ‘a’ or ‘an’, so  it’s useful to remember this idea.

Here, there are many possible questions you  *could* ask, but you just want to ask one. Use ‘the’ when it’s obvious which  thing you mean. You often use ‘the’ in this way to talk about things  around you which you can see and touch.

There are many windows in the world, but  if someone asks you to close *the* window, you probably know which window they mean.

Now, let’s move on to level two.