@M.A.R. Great for some people that we can't cash in our rep. Otherwise occasionally we will have to call it in and some occasional foolishness will land people in jail
@Dum It's a good way of learning to translate, which is not to say it won't be helpful to your English in general. When you're thinking of a word in your first language that you want to express in English, as a translator you'll probably think of the English equivalent quicker than someone who isn't one, but that's not how producing English works in general (proficient speakers of English do not translate while speaking English).
But this approach has some obvious disadvantages. You'll have to adjust the text you're translating to suit your purposes: do you want to speak/write literary like a book? a magazine? a news report? are you going to make up your own sentences? etc. Then you'll have to look up words you don't know. Where are you gonna look them up? In a bilingual dictionary? What if there are multiple words listed as translations of the word you want?
English has a lot of "unnecessary" words, each with its own nuance of meaning and collocations, and so on. Now you have to find these words used in context... Boring! Haha. So yeah, I'd say it's better than nothing, but not an ideal approach.
Intuitively I know it's wrong, but having done some research I didn't find any rule that would directly prohibit usage of an article before a number in a sentence like that. I understand that "a/an" in them and of themselves mean "one", but there must be some rule..
Of course, if there was a question on ELU at the moment that was more sophisticated, with good answers, I would have preferred they gain more votes from the HNQ crowd. But I'm not watching ELU's main questions.
There's a subset of questions when it's almost entirely pointless to ask for a rule, or a why. "What's the rule for pronunciation of u?" "Why is 'is' not spelled as 'iz'?"
@AIQ You might say "I have the one son", I dunno about that one
I mostly find it a matter of wording. They might as well have said "discuss this sentence. 2 pts"
What I find is a worse attitude is the ELL attitude of "just gimme the right sentence". They're not looking for an explanation. It seems to me this person did. "Why am I prohibited from using this sentence?" is how I read their question at a glance.
Of course, it could be worded better. You can downvote it for that, and that's your vote. And also if there's a better™ question worth reading, an ELU regular that was checking the front page would have preferred if that one made it to HNQ, if ELU has only one slot there.
@AIQ The point is that the answer would explain what "a" is, and what "one" is, and the patterns in the language where those two categories would go together, and the patterns that would not
But the example they provided happened to be simple enough to allow one variable to be tested
I can assure you, if it had another grammatical error in that sentence, it would have ended up with close votes and downvotes, because people would feel like they'd be correcting the learner's language than explaining anything of value.
But it might be interesting to a native speaker why, when they evaluate "a one" in their mind, it sounds wrong at times and right at other times
@AIQ Part of it is obviously random chance. You show five questions to 20 people, they're like "meh" for four and upvote the fifth. Three people happen to do this, and it grabs the attention of the other 17.
Intuitively I know it's wrong, but having done some research I didn't find any rule that would directly prohibit usage of an article before a number in a sentence like that. I understand that "a/an" in them and of themselves mean "one", but there must be some rule..
Language Overflow
Language Overflow