People: countable or uncountable? Tips to help you not forget

[bitheerani319]

You've probably already learned how to differentiate between countable and uncountable words in English, right? This is an essential skill to learn at the beginning levels, because it will help us identify essential elements of the sentence such as the verb or the determiners. Even though you've already covered this topic, some words can be more complicated than others. For example, is the word people countable or uncountable?

But before continuing with this, let's do a brief review: what is countable or uncountable?

Countable and uncountable nouns: a quick review
As the name suggests, a countable noun is one that can be counted, that is, they colombia phone number list to elements that can be separated into units. If we take the noun "cup" as an example, we can talk about one, two or more cups.

Uncountable nouns, on the other hand, cannot be broken down into units. We cannot, for example, count “water” – we would have to use phrases like “a glass” or “a bottle” to do so.

Free eBook: Quantifiers in English: How to use them?


But be careful, in Spanish it is much more common than in English to count uncountable nouns by omitting the main noun, as is the case with "two coffees", "three beers" or "several rices".

What is the quickest way to identify whether a word is countable or not? It's very simple: we count it. Putting a word in the plural to see how it sounds is a very good way to find out if it is countable or not. However, you have to be very careful when doing this, since both English and Spanish have words that are uncountable but can be put in the plural with a slight change in meaning: