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The 3 articles in English are a, an and the. The learner has to decide noun-by-noun which one of the articles to use. In fact, there are 4 choices to make, because sometimes no article is necessary.Native-speakers, of course, use the articles correctly without thinking in everyday spoken language. English learners, on the other hand, need to have some guidelines for making the right choice - particularly those learners whose own language does not have articles, such as Japanese or Korean. The guidelines that follow here should help ESL students to a basic understanding of English article use.