Do native English speakers ever get mixed up with these?

For a non-native speaker like myself, uncountable nouns and countable nouns in English language are extremely tricky.

"Baggage, luggage, stuff, clothing, equipment" are uncountable nouns, but too me, they seem countable.

In contrast, "outfit, instrument, service, tradition" don't seem to be countable, however they are all countable nouns in English language.

I, as a non-native English speaker, often make mistakes like:
"I have take my stuffs back." (stuff can't be plural!)
"She has different outfit." (either 'a' or 'the' should be used!)

I'm just curious if native English speakers ever make such mistakes.
When you see an unfamilar noun, do native speakers automatically tell if it is countable or uncountable?

Do you ever get confused with using proper "the", "a" and "an"?
(Of course, these questions are for native speakers of English!)

I would say for the most part no, but there is a commonplace pattern, particularly amongst younger people, of using nouns that are normally count nouns as mass nouns. However, though, this is normally associated with a deliberate shifting of the sense and connotations of the noun in question. It is generally associated with referring to things as a general material or substance rather than as a set of discrete objects, especially when that in question is not really a set of discrete objects or is not being treated in a discrete fashion (such as if one were referring to something as a type of food). For instance, to use a supposedly ungrammatical example from Wikipedia,

>>Bad: *There's house on the road. (Bad even if the situation of war is considered)<<

I could actually see some younger people saying just that if, say, a house were blown up and pieces of it were strewn across the road in question.

<When you see an unfamiliar noun, do native speakers automatically tell if it is countable or uncountable? >

Well, if it's unfamiliar I would have to look it up first. I general, though, I don't give this kind of thing a second though. In fact I hadn't even heard of the concept of "countable/uncountable" before I started reading this forum.


<Do you ever get confused with using proper "the", "a" and "an"?>

I'd have to say no, I don't get confused.

No we are not confused by any of these things and we notice it immediately if a non-native speaker slips up.

Native speakers often speak ungrammatically, but NEVER with 'the' and 'a'. I don't know why, but I've never once heard a mistake. It's just so common and natural I guess...

No, we don't usually have many problems with that. We grow up with them and just expect certain words to be followed by certain other words. It's like the grammatical gender in Romance languages that is so hard for us to remember but is second nature to the native speakers of those languages.

The major mistakes that I think native speakers make is making verbs agree with those nouns -- sometimes we use is when it really usually implies the plural are, and vice-versa. So native common usage isn't always strictly logical. We might for instance say, "None of my friends are going", when logically, "none" is a contraction of "not one" and the sentence SHOULD be: "None (not one) of my friends is coming." But we tend to think of none as implying more than one, or make the verb agree with "friends" instead, or something like that. So you will hear discrepancies like that. People are so used to them that no one usually notices, and in fact may think they are saying them correctly -- or even find the correct usage awkward, just because it no longer "sounds" right.

Thanks for your insightful replies.

Then what about when writing an essay or a paper?
If native speakers write a paragraph in a rush, do they ever slip up/miss the proper 'the', 'a' or 'an'? (Say, for the first draft of your essay and providing you didn't proofread it)

In this case, can native speakers of English make mistakes?

Never truly by mistake, although at times I have gone back and changed some words to ones requiring different articles, but forgetting to change the articles and only changing the words.

Pretty much any word, a native speaker can forget to type it. Especially if they're interrupted in the middle of the sentence.

Travis' post made me think about it for a bit, and I think most nouns can be used in an uncountable sense. For instance, "there's tomato all over my clothes". I wonder about you getting mixed up on "stuff". Would you say "I have a stuff"?

In fact, "stuff" is really the prototypical uncountable noun. A countable noun is a thing, an uncountable noun is stuff. Each countable noun names a different thing, and each uncountable noun names a different type of stuff. An "instrument" for instance, is a thing you use to make music. "Clothing" is stuff you wear. So whether it's countable or uncountable is just part of the definition. Unfortunately, "thing" and "stuff" are considered "low-brow" words, so you probably won't see a dictionary define "tradition" as "a thing that people do because other people did it in the past" or "luggage" as "stuff you carry around with you on a trip". The traditional definition of "noun" is "person, place, or thing", but maybe it should be "person, place, thing, or stuff".

I think that I should also add that many words can be uncountable or countable, and often have different meanings depending on how they're used. Often, if a word is used uncountably, it basically means "all the countable instances considered together or in general". So it is perfectly gramatical to say "We capitalize proper nouns out of tradition". There, "tradition" means "stuff that's traditional". Sometimes this will lead to apparently circular definitions in the dictionary, with "tradition" being defined as "that which is traditional" and "traditional" defined as "having to do with traditions". It's not actually circular, as the uncountable "tradition" is defined in terms of "traditional", which is defined in terms of countable "tradition".

I would say "a" "the" and "an" a never confused by natives. I have never heard of such a mistake in the list of common errors natives make--I personally have never heard it either.

When you're growing up you learn it as second nature and know that for example it's not "an car" but "a car" or "an observation" not "a observation" or "I'm going to a store" not "an store"...it's actually a pretty simple rule if you think about it..."an" only follows words that start with a vowel...off the top of my head I can't think of any exceptions, and don't know if there are any.

Most of the native errors are spelling mistakes, noun-verb agreements, and things like "they're" "their" and "there," confusing when to use "was" and "were" are common among natives.

In any event, I think "an" and "a" are far simpler to understand for english learners than say the "en," "de" and "à" of french which in many cases seem completely randomly chosen and don't follow a logical "in" or "from" forms.

BMW,

I think that the real question is how you choose the right type of article, not the right form of the indefinite article. The a/an rule is simple and straightforward. I don't think many non-native speakers find it really hard. What I still get confused with is how you decide on definite vs. indefinite vs. no article at all.

How, for instance, would you explain this? My co-worker, who is a native English speaker, was telling me about his weekend. His wife is expecting a baby, so he said that "they were preparing the house for baby". Now, why there isn't any article before "baby". Was that just a slip of the tongue or was that a rare case of the kind of mistake Super Korean talks about?

<<In this case, can native speakers of English make mistakes? >>

There's this theory of native speaker infallibility, that says native speakers don't make grammatical errors. They do make typo's, tongue slips, and spelling erorrs, and there are often grammar problems when you go back and edit part of a sentence without fixing the rest.

For example, if you had some native speakers that consistently say something like:

"We suggest that all attendees are in their assigned seats by 9:55AM."

this would just be considered a variant usage [of "are" rather than "be"].

No slip of the tongue at all.....

In this case the definite article isn't required.....Baby is simply used as a substitute for the infant's name, and it does not detract from its status as a live, if very little, human being at all.

I don't think many people actually refer to their infants as Baby although it seems that they used to many years ago. I saw this extract from an old b&w film featuring this young married couple trying to fit their young baby into the gas mask specially designed for infants on the outbreak of WW2 in Britain.....a gas mask was issued to everybody resident in this country at that time. The baby gas mask was a scary, very weird looking device and the baby was placed into it entirely, and was visible lying inside it through a sort of visor on the front of it.

The mother became hysterical for obvious reasons and all she could do was yell out: "Get Baby out of there! Get Baby out of there!" Both she and her husband kept referring to the child as Baby even after they had extricated the screaming infant out of the bloody thing, so maybe calling it that was common in those days, but it isn't today, not that I know of anyway, but I'm not much into the baby scene anyway. My sister is expecting her first baby around Christmas time...I'll wait and see what happens then.

It also seems a wee bit de-humanising to refer to a baby as "it", but it happens...maybe between birth and the wetting of its head at the font...or maybe before a name is finally decided upon, I'm not sure.

You'll see a smiling face,
A fireplace,
A cosy room,
A little nest that's nestled where the roses bloom....

Just Molly and me,
AND BABY MEAKES THREE;
We're happy in
My blue heaven.......

Thanks, Damian.

Now it makes sense to me.

What do you think of this case, though? In Kipling's "The Finest Story in The World" Grish Chunder, a young Bengali law student, was "dressed with
scrupulous care in frock coat, tall hat, light trousers and tan gloves."

I can't seem to find a plausible explanation why the author omitted articles in this parallel structure. Only one of my grammar books allows this but only in fixed idiomatic expressions like "eye to eye" or "from top to bottom". Others suggest using articles before each member of the structure or only before the first one.

Any ideas?