How English Works #2
How English Works 2
Non-count Nouns
Intermediate
In this series, we learn about English grammar differently than usual. There are no charts, no memorization, no confusing rules with millions of exceptions. Instead, we look at interesting aspects of English and how you can understand them. Don't worry if you fully understand. Notice these while you're immersing in English, and it'll all make sense with time.
Hi, I'm Ben, and welcome to Ben's Language Lab. Today, we're going to talk a little bit about how English works. In this series, we talk about English grammar, but not in the way that you're used to. Here we don't do any drills, we don't look at any charts, and you don't have to memorize anything. Instead, the goal is to learn how to better understand English so that you can learn these things a little more easily and without as much confusion. Today, we're going to be talking about non-count, oops, count nouns. which is a bit of a fancy name, but let's break it down. So nouns, those are things. We think of them as a person, a place, a thing, or an idea. Where's my eraser? There it is. And so someone like me, Ben is a noun, I am a noun, that's actually a pronoun, but it's still a kind of noun. Somebody is a noun, so is a place, like home is a noun, or Paris is also a noun, a place. It can be a specific place, right, like Paris or my bedroom. It could also be a generic place, like outside. Anything like that can be a noun, it's a place. And then we have a thing, which is something like an apple. Or a water bottle. Anything is a noun. These are the most common nouns as they appear everywhere. We talk about things all the time. And then ideas as well. Those are kind of an extension of a thing, but it helps to think about ideas. So for example, knowledge. L-E-D-G-E. Knowledge is also a noun. You can think a thought is a noun, right? It's sort of like a thing that's in your mind, right? So it's not a real thing, it's a mind thing. You can think about it like that. So that's what a noun is. Now let's get into the part about non-count. Non-count, what is that? So the first thing, count, is right one, two, three, four, five. We can count something. So for example, dogs are countable. You can have one dog, There's one, give him some ears. It's a terrible dog. You can have a second dog. You can have as many dogs as you want and you can count them. This is dog number one. This is dog number two. I'm counting them, right? You can have anything that you can count. Here are some USB drives. I have two USB drives. I can count them. Things that are non-count are things that you can't count. There's either, zero of it or it is. So think about air. I'm breathing in air is non-count because there's either it's how is you can't ask how many air are there. It's either a yes or a no. But dogs, it can be there's no, like there's zero dogs, or there's one, two, three, all the way up to one million dogs, right? So you can count any number of dogs. Air, it doesn't matter how much there is. If it's even the tiniest amount of air, we say there is air, right? And if there's no air, you can't breathe, There's no air. And fun fact, that's called a vacuum, which is one of the few words in English that has two u's next to each other. As far as I know, there is one other word in English that has two u's next to each other. Can you find what it is? Tell me in the comments below. And so, this is a non-count noun. Something where instead of counting how much there is, it's a yes or no question. So a really good example is something like water, right? My bottle has water in it. That doesn't tell you if there's this much or this much, right? You don't have one water or five water in it. It's just, there is water in my water bottle. Speaking of which, stay hydrated. It's good for you. So, oops, sorry. We know that there is some things that you can and can't count. Now, there are also some ones that are a little bit weird, right? So if we go to something like fish, you have one fish, two fish, three fish. Those are countable, but it never changes, right? You don't start saying fishes necessarily. You can actually, that's a thing you can say, but most people will just say fish, right? I have three fish. And so it kind of behaves in this weird way because with something like air, we don't put an S at the end, right? We don't say airs, what we do with dogs, right? We can't let them, when we have more than one, but with fish, we just say one, two, three, fish. And so you get this kind of high, oh, I think my thing just crashed. Hang on, let me get my writing back. Yeah, you can't see my screen. One second, I'll be right back. Okay, I think we're back now. Let's see, yeah, okay, now we're good, sorry. The recording for this just decided to stop, but okay, we're gonna keep going. So what was I saying? Fish, you can count them, right? There's one, two, three fish, but the word doesn't change. So it kind of behaves a little bit like that. But it is a countable noun because you can count fish. Something like sheep is also a weird one. because you can do the same thing. One, two, three, sheep. There's a sheep. I have sheep. So you can get to this place where it's like kind of non-countable, but also countable. This is pretty common, especially for things that are dealt with in big numbers, right? So pretty much any animal kind of will fit into this, except it's more like plural versus non-plural. Not pretty much any animal. Lots of animals, rather. I said that wrong. Um, but there's something even weirder that I want to get into. That's pretty easy. You can figure out that fish and one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. Those are pretty easy to count, but whatever. The weird thing is when it comes into words like, uh, waters, that's totally fine. That is a word. You can have three waters. but it's not referring to the same idea, right? The water that's non-countable is just in existence. In my bottle, there is water. But if you go and ask somebody for three waters, they're going to give you three cups of water or three bottles of water. So there's this other thing that's implied at the beginning sort of thing where there's like a different unit of water, if that makes sense. So if you ask for three waters at a restaurant, they're gonna bring you three cups of water. Oop, that's not a cup. They're gonna bring you three cups full of water because you asked for three of them. If you just ask for water, they might only bring one for you or something like that. Can I have some water please? Would be water for you, but can we get three waters? It's like everybody here wants water or whatever it is. You can also, you can do this with pretty much any noun. Not all of them make a ton of sense, but you can do it if you want. One you might see if you ever go to the US or an English speaking country is the word persons. Because most people learn that there is one person and then there are two people. Right, that is the, Plural version of person is what we think of right? So I'll put this up here actually No Yeah, I was correct. There it is. So one person two people, but that's what we say But the word persons does exist as does the word peoples and This is actually because they are two different words that kind of got combined and A person is referring to the individual person, right? I am a person. You are a person. And when you refer to persons, you're saying that there are several individuals somewhere. And the only real place that you see persons is on a sign that'll say maximum occupancy. of 100 persons, right? I don't know if you've seen that before, but a maximum occupancy is the largest number of people that you can have in one room or one building. That's occupancy is the number of occupants, which are people inside something. but they use the word persons, partly because it's an old, it's just how we say it, right? We just know that, but also because they're referring to each individual human being and they want to be specific about that, right? Because actually 100 people isn't as legally clear, if that makes sense. And so we use persons, and you can say five persons. Don't actually use that in English. Nobody's ever going to say it, but this is sort of explaining what the difference is between people and persons. The peoples is also something, right? You can have, let's say, five peoples. but this is referring to specifically large groups of people. So, for example, North America is home to many native peoples. Right? You wouldn't say many native people because it's different groups of distinct peoples. And so it kind of refers, you can think of it a bit like tribes or groups, right? You can count those. And so that's when you might hear the slight difference there. So generally we consider people to be non-count because you have person, right? It's the plural version. It's non-count, but you can almost always count something that's non-countable because you're counting individual units of that thing in some way. And so, this might seem a little bit complicated, but when you hear it, I promise it'll start to make sense. Focus on things that don't have numbers, right? That they just get this yes or no thing. Right, so it's like, is there this or is there not? Some other common ones are, let's see, let's go to these. Some other common ones that you might come across are data, right? Actually, it used to be countable. There are data, but now we say there is data. It's now non-count. There's one data, two data, like it's all just data. Same with information. Information. There's also one that I see all the time. Oh, stuff is a great one, actually. Stuff. You don't say stuffs, right? It's just stuff. Things, on the other hand, is countable, right? You can have one thing, two things, but you can only have stuff or no stuff. That's a really good example of the difference between count and non-count. What's the one that I see all the time? Oh, content. Content. Content is something you cannot count. I see this mistake pretty often with English learners. They say that they've been enjoying some contents. but that's like the stuff that is inside something else. Again, non-countable as well, but it's a different word. Some content in English or some content is like many movies or many TV shows or my videos are content, but they are not contents, right? You don't have two contents that you enjoy, it's just content. Um, so these are some examples of these non countable nouns that you're going to come across in your immersion. So don't try to memorize this. Don't try to look up charts of what's non countable and what's not. Try to understand this as best as you can and then keep an eye out for it in your immersion and it will make a lot more sense as you get better and better understanding English. But that's everything that I have for today. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to leave a like and subscribe for more like it. And also in the comments, along with that other W word, not W, W word, let me know what other topics you'd like me to cover. And I'll talk, I'll talk about those in a future video. That's all that I have for day. Um, and I'll see you next time. Bye.
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