Nouns & Article's 

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Nouns. This lesson is about plural and singular nouns, and articles.

Nouns can be singular or plural. Singular means one, plural means two or more. Singular is book and plural is two books, or five books, or many books. Before we go on with nouns, let's look again at the alphabet. This is the alphabet. You already know about capital and lowercase letters. Let's look at another kind of letter.

The alphabet has vowels and consonants.

A, e, i, o, u. These are called vowels. Every word in English has at least one vowel. All of these other letters are called consonants. We need to know this for some spelling rules we will talk about in a moment. Back to nouns. Add an s to the noun to make the plural form. We have one chair and two chairs. Notice the s. Add an s to make the plural form. Two chairs, 20 chairs, or 300 chairs.

There are spelling changes when you add s. Let's look at what happens when you add s to different words. First, for most nouns, we just add an s. Boy changes to boys, truck changes to trucks. But sometimes we add es. Box changes to boxes, and we add es to dish to get dishes. Sometimes we drop the y and add ies. For example baby, we dropped the y and add ies to get babies, and cherry we drop the y and an ies to get cherries. Let's take a closer look. For most nouns, add s. The plural of boy is boys, and we have one truck and two trucks. Here is one bird, we add an s, we have two birds. Orange is the same, add an s, and we have two oranges.

Add es for s, ch, sh, x, and z endings. That means if the noun ends with a sound like s, sh, ch, x, z, we need to add es. Box ends with x, so we add es and we get boxes. Dish ends with a sh sound. To make the plural, we add es and we get dishes. Dress ends with an s. We can't just add an s because the word would sound the same, so we add es and we have two dresses. One inch becomes 12 inches because of that ch ending sound, we add es.

For nouns that end with a consonant and y, drop the lie and add ies. Baby ends with by, so we drop the y and add ies to get two babies. The noun cherry ends with ry, so we dropped the y and add ies to get the plural cherries. Look at the word city, city ends with ty. That is also a consonant and a y, so again, we dropped the y and add ies. Finally, here is one French fry. If we want more than one, we need to drop that y and add ies, and now we have many French fries. Notice the difference, all of these nouns end with y, but for these, we just add s, and for these, we drop the y and add ies. Why? Well, notice the endings. Over here, these end with a vowel and a y. That's why we just add s to get monkeys and toys. But over here, these end with a consonant and a y, and that's why we dropped the y and add ies to get cities and fries.

Some nouns have irregular plural forms. There is not a spelling rule, we just have to know these. Here's some examples. One man, two or more men, woman, women, child, children, person, people. Notice that none of these plural forms have s endings, they are irregular. There are some other irregular plural nouns. Here are a few examples. One tooth, two teeth, one leaf, three leaves, one mouse two mice, these are irregular, so we just have to learn them. Singular nouns also have some rules. The words a and an are called articles. We use articles before singular nouns. Let's look. Sarah is a student. She has a red coat. She has a backpack and three books.

Notice the a in front of the singular nouns, but here we have three, so we don't need an article.

A sounds like uh and I'm sure you hear it all the time, but it is a very small sound. Listen. I am a teacher. She is a good student. There's a gym in the building. Do you have a minute? I'll have a small cup of coffee. Have a nice day. A is everywhere. Let's look at a and an. Use an before a vowel sound. A and an are the same thing, but we use an when the noun starts with the vowel sound. Remember, the vowels are a, e, i, o, u. Here are some examples a bottle, a phone, a sofa. An elephant, an airport, an onion. Notice the e in elephant, that is a vowel sound, so we need to use an before it. Airport also starts with a vowel, so we use an and so does onion. We use an with these nouns, but it means the same thing as a. We use it because of those vowel sounds. Let's practice. You are going to see a word, think, do we use a or an? House, a house. Orange, an orange. Umbrella, an umbrella. Spoon, a spoon. Bird, a bird. Owl, an owl. How did you do? Do you see all the vowel sounds that start the words on the right? Here's one more, guitar, a guitar. But an electric guitar, why? Electric is an adjective. Adjectives describe nouns and adjectives come before nouns in English. Electric also starts with a vowel sound. It comes before the noun, but the article comes first, this is why we say an electric guitar.

Adjectives come before nouns. This is Tom. Tom is a cat. Tom is fat. We can take the adjective fat and put it before cat. Tom is a fat cat. But do you see the article, it's still in front. We can put more adjectives in front of cat. We can say Tom is a fat gray cat. But notice the article is before the adjectives and the adjectives are before the cat.

You learned a lot in this lesson. There are singular and plural nouns, there are spelling changes in the plural, like trucks, dishes, and cherries.

There are irregular plural nouns like men, women, and children, leaves, and mice. We use articles for singular nouns, a bird, an orange, and we put adjectives before nouns. A big red umbrella. End.