Comment by theanonymousone
4 hours ago
The most problematic for me as a non-native has been "the" vs "nothing", i.e. when one can/should put the definite article.
Pre-LLM I was joking that real AI is whatever can make that decision correctly 100% of times.
Try making it with "a" - if thing can be "a thing" then it could be "the thing" but if it can't be "a thing" it definitely can't be "the thing" either.
Right on the money!
In the 16th century, being "on the money" meant an arrow or a dart being on (or near) a specific physical coin (i.e. the money), like in a tossing or shooting bar-bet.
Being on merely a money (or some money) would likely not be as impressive in said circumstances, and so whilst being grammatically possible in English, it shouldn't seem so likely the sort of thing anyone would ever have had to say.
"I play the piano" or "I play piano"?
Weirdly, as an en_GB native, neither of these seems wrong to me. I suspect one is British and one is American, and too much TV has driven me to accept the American one.
1 reply →
"i play piano" - i know how to play piano "i play the piano" - i am playing the piano
that is just my intuition as native english speaker, but the former cojld also mean the latter and i have seen it used like such before.
With context these can mean different things. You might also play a piano, or hire either a player piano, or a piano player.
If you are answering which instrument you play, it's the former, but if we are talking the profession it's the latter, because you don't say then that you play a piano.
How do you feel about adjective ordering rules? I always wondered what this was like from the outside.
True. That's also a big ambiguity to me. But for some reason I never cared about it as much :/
As a patron of the 405, there is no consensus.