Why you should know: The ‘a’ vs ‘an’ conundrum is not about what letter actually begins the word, but instead about how the sound of the word starts.

For example, the ‘h’ in ‘hour’ is silent, so you would say ‘an hour’ and not ‘a hour’. A trickier example is Ukraine: because the ‘U’ is pronounced as ‘You’, and in this case the ‘y’ is a consonant, you would say “a Ukraine” and not “an Ukraine”.

Tip: when in doubt, sound it out(loud).

Reference

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  • ouRKaoS@lemmy.today
    1·
    11 hours ago

    I’m a native English speaker, not fluent in any other languages, and I still fuck up it’s / its on a regular basis.

    • spujb@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      1·
      3 hours ago

      no shame in that. it’s rough. fun fact: even the US founding fathers got it wrong

      he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither (Thomas Jefferson’s original rough draft of the Declaration of Independence)

      later prints corrected this error which happens three times from Jefferson’s hand.

    • troglodyte_mignon@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      10 hours ago

      I’m under the impression that mistakes like it’s/its tend to be more common among native speakers than among people who learn the language as teenagers/grown-ups. I might be wrong, though, it’s not like I have any data on the subject.