Hello!
This video is about things that you can count and things you cannot count. I'm going to
write here 'pounds' and 'euros' and underneath I'll write 'chairs' and 'tables' then over
here 'money' and 'furniture'. Hope you enjoy it!
This scene 1 and we've got two friends having a conversation - Polly, Polly Glot (haha)
and his friend Ginger and Polly says "did you know, you can't count money (oops)?" and
Ginger who is counting as we speak says "Yes, you can!", of course you can count money!
And Polly says "well, you can count pounds" and here's some, £20 , "or euros (and here's
some euros) or dollars (here's some dollars, or one dollar actually) or even yen, you can
count (here's some yen) but you can't say 'three moneys'". In fact, I'll just cross
that out because you can't say 'three moneys'. Why not?
Right, I'll just put a circle round all that and link them all together, the whole lot,
all that together is 'money'. Now so euro and pounds and dollars and yen and you can
say 'a pound' or you can say 'some pounds' (with an 's') or you can say 'ten pounds'
or 'twenty pounds' or whatever it is and you can say 'money'. But you can't say 'a money'
so I'll cross that out. You can say 'some money' because you can use 'some' with countable
things or uncountable things. And so, on the left here 'a pound', 'some pounds' those are
what we call 'count nouns', you can also call them 'countable nouns', both names exist.
And over here this is called a 'mass noun' also often called 'uncountable'.
Alright, let's move on to scene two, that's a little bit different. Here we are, here's
Polly and Ginger again, and with some cookies. And Ginger says "Ah, cookies!" and Polly says
"Yes, and you can count them...", 'you can count them'. And here are some more things
that you can eat and that you can count; some carrots, three carrots, you can count those
and two apples, you can count the apples; and some sausages, you can count the sausages
and some cookies, you can the cookies. So they are all 'count nouns', I'll just write
in 'count nouns'. But now, suppose I draw a cicle round the whole lot, a cloud round
the whole lot, they are all 'food', I'll write 'food' up there. Now, 'food' is not a countable
nounl, you can't count food so it's a mass noun, I'll write up here 'food is a mass noun'.
And, let's move on to scene three and Polly and Ginger are still here and this time Polly
is speaking and she's saying (I'll just write it here) "And here's another set of items...".
And here we go, a couple of chairs and a table, you could have two or three chairs and an
arm chair, you can count arm chairs and a bed and you can count beds. But suppose that
we put all these items together into one group, I'll just draw a cloud round the whole lot.
All those as individuals are count nouns , count nouns but together they are 'furniture', as
a collection they are furniture and furniture is a mass noun. Now we're going on to the
last section with a few examples.
First of all the three examples that we started with, here we go, examples. Here are the three
we looked at 'money', 'food' and 'furniture' - are these mass nouns in your language? I'll
just write 'mass' up here and 'count' on the other side and here are some more, I'm going
to add three more. First of all 'luggage' which is mass 'bags, suitcases and backpacks'
you can count but not luggage. And here's another one, a tricky one this, 'news'. 'News'
is singular, it's got an 's' but it's singular, you can count stories or news items or bits
of news but not 'news'. And the last one in my little list 'Music' - you can count 'songs'
but you can't count 'music'. But there's another slightly different type of mass nounand I've
got four examples of it here: 'water', 'milk', 'wood', and 'bread'. These are mass nouns
because they really are impossible to count, unless of course you decide to break them
up. So, we can talk about, for example, a 'glass of water', I'll just write 'glass'
there - 'a glass of water, a glass of milk, a bottle of water'. We can have a 'piece of
wood', a 'plank of wood' or talking about bread we can have a 'slice of bread' or you
can have a 'loaf of bread'. So these are words which are naturally mass nouns which you can
break down into segments using words like 'glass of', 'piece of' and so on. And sometimes
you can even turn them into count nouns, take 'coffee' for example is grown is Brazil, that's
a mass noun but you can have 'two coffees' - "two coffees please", so watch out for that!
Right, that's all, hope you found it useful, bye for now!