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Yi Zhang
countable and uncountable nouns There are a few nouns in English can be countable in one situation and uncountable in another, such as "experience", "effort" and "noise". Is there any method that can help me to determine when and under which situation they are countable, and when are not. Thank you very much.
2018年3月26日 11:04
回答 · 2
2
Zhang,

The nouns that you refer to become countable when they are seperated by person, place, distance, intensity or time. I think one thing that might be confusing you is that the types of word that you describe can be pluralized; however, they are only you're trying to quantify and label them.

For example, when you go to a resort on vacation, you can have many different experiences, such as shopping, snorkeling, massage and spa treatments, fine dining and hiking, but the brochure will not say that they offer 5 experiences; rather it will refer generically to the experiences it offers. If the brochure stted that the resort offered five different experiences would suggest that it offers five different packages, for example a spa package, and a water adventure package, etc. To further illustrate: a group of 10 people can go on the same vacation and have either similar experiences if they do the same activities, or they can have completely different experiences, depending upon what they did, what they ate, and who they met. In that case, you could say that they all had different experiences, but you wouldn't say, "They had 10 different experiences" unless you were trying to accentuate the fact that so many varied experiences were possible.

The principle is similar for noise. If you wake up in the middle of the night, you might here a noise in your apartment. Alternately, you might hear multiple noises coming from the front room window, kitchen and balcony. In that last case, you would tell the police that you heard noises coming from those places, but you wouldn't say that you heard three noises, rather, that you heard noises from three different places.

2018年3月26日
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