- [Voiceover] Grammarians,
I would like to tell you a tale of two elephants. In order to get at the idea of this thing called the article. 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, 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. Are you thinking about any old elephant when you talk about an elephant, or are you thinking about
one elephant in particular? The elephant. And this is the difference. When we're talking about the elephant we're talking about a specific elephant. We have particular one in mind. This what's called the definite. Because it defines what
we're talking about. You know, this elephant could
be the queen of the elephants. 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 and who we're talking about and why. That's a case where you
would use the word "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. You would say "an" elephant, because it's not specific... and it's undefined. So, grammarians call that
an indefinite article. When you know who and
what you are talking about for sure you say "the". And when you're not sure,
you say "a" or "an". So if you knew 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". 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. So "the" for specific, "a"
or "an" for nonspecific. You can learn anything, David out.