Intro to articles | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy

Garans, I would like to tell you a Tale of Two Elephants in order to get at the idea of this thing called the article, and we'll explain what that is after I tell you about the elephant and an elephant.

Now, articles are words like a, or an, or the. Articles are a kind of adjective; some people would call them a determiner, uh, that help you figure out how important something is or how specific something is.

So, articles—what articles do is they tell you whether or not something is specific. You know, are you thinking about any old elephant when you talk about an elephant, or are you thinking about one elephant in particular—the elephant? This is the difference.

You know, when we're talking about the elephant, we're thinking about a specific elephant; we have a particular one in mind. This is what's called the definite article because it defines what we're talking about. You know, this elephant could be the queen of the elephants.

And sometimes, when we make sentences, we want to aim for that kind of precision. We want to be precise; we want to know exactly what we're talking about and who we're talking about and why. And that's a case where you would use the word "the" or "the."

Now, if you're not being specific, if you're talking about any old elephant—an elephant that you're not especially familiar with, an elephant you haven't introduced before—that would be, you would say "an elephant," because it's not specific and it's undefined.

So, uh, Grimarians call that an indefinite article. When you know who and what you are talking about for sure, you say "the" or "the." And when you're not sure, you say "a" or "an."

So, if you knew that you were talking about a specific elephant, say for example the queen of the elephants—the queen, as indicated by her royal crown—you would say "the." And if you were talking about any old elephant, you'd say "an" and you'd use the indefinite article.

We'll cover this more later; I just wanted to give you an introduction to the idea of what an article is: "the" for specific and "a" or "an" for non-specific. You can learn anything.

David out.