These days the human race has accumulated so much knowledge  that no single human being could possibly hold all this information in their head. But a monkey could probably be taught how to search for information on the Internet, our could it?

As a part time IT professional for a local canned fish firm I spend quite a bit of time helping people resolve issues on their computers. Now, the kicker is I don't have a formal degree in computer science or anything of the kind. A lot of the time when they call me in and show me their screen with some weird message displayed across it I have no idea what the issue is.

What do I do? I just sit down right there in front of them and simply google the error message, then open the links the search returns one at a time. Usually it will be some kind of an IT forum, someone else will already have had the exact same issue and they'll have shared tips on how to fix it so I just follow the instructions and presto the problem's gone. I sometimes can't help wondering why people can't do this stuff on their own: you have a problem - google it (or duckduckgo it or bing it or whatever) 

And this brings me to the issue of computer literacy. What is it anyway and how do you define it? Does computer literacy simply mean being able to type stuff into a computer? Or just knowing how to use a word processor and the Internet? Or is it supposed to be something more than that? Should people be aware of at least the very basics of how computers work, that it's algorithms written by ordinary fallible humans that are running the whole show and that perhaps when something goes wrong just a little bit you don't necessarily need to panic and call the IT department, you might wanna try and resolve the issue on your own, sometimes all it takes is for you to just relaunch that process that failed or click on that OK button harder and I mean literally, I've seen that happen, you know like the first time you clicked on it, the app might have been busy doing something else in the background and your click would have gone unnoticed then. 

So I would like to take this opportunity to encourage whoever is reading this to read up on at least the basics of how computers and software work (there's lots of information on here, for example: howstuffworks.com) and if you do run into problems with your computer, before dialling tech support and waiting for 30 minutes until they get back to you, you might wanna just try searching for it on line. 

With the Internet at our fingertips we can all be experts on demand if we put our mind to it. 

Formal schooling provides people a very structured environment. When you have school, you always know where to go and what to do. It's especially true about grade school and high school. It's more true for some countries than others, I would imagine. In some countries students have elective subjects, but in many other countries they're given very little choice. Like you might be required to take a foreign language and your only choice might be which language you're going to take but you have got to take a foreign language: there is no choice about that.

So, kids are given this very structured environment where they are essentially guided and prodded every step of the way and then when school ends they are thrust into the real world, which, it turns out, is extremely chaotic. The experience can be especially bruising for those who leave school at the height of an economic crisis because often times they find that the skills they worked so hard to acquire are not really needed in the market, at least not at this moment. 

It's also funny how in school kids are taught to play by the rules imposed on them from the outside but in the real world, in the world outside school, there are essentially no rules except for those you make for yourself. Sure there's law and if you go and do something really stupid you'll get in trouble for that, like if you go and steal something. But guess what, in our society people get away with stealing all the time as long as they redefine and repackage it as something else, for example as 'government work' and suddenly it's no longer stealing or embezzlement, it's allocation of treasury funds. And even if you get greedy and get caught red handed, despite the fact that you may have helped yourself to millions of dollars, you'll most likely be in much less trouble than the schuck that gets caught stealing food from a supermarket because he's hungry. 

Anyway, my point is school is too structured and too unlike the real world. Instead of preparing kids for life, it prepares them for some idealised idea of what life should be if it was a perfect sphere in a vacuum. Sort of like all those nice differentiation formulas kids learn in school but that are hardly ever used in real life engineering where you have to rely on discrete mathematics to find specific solutions for equations that do not have any analytical solutions at all. That's school for you in a nutshell. 

If any of you are still in school: beware, it's total chaos out there. 

I'm talking about the/a/an.

If, like me, you come from a language that does not have articles as such (my native language is Russian), then those pesky little articles they've got in English can give you one hell of a, well ..., hell. 

If you don't have articles in your own language it can really be hard to wrap your head around the very concept of articles, like what do they even need them for in English, anyway? Like why say 'a dog' or 'the dog' and not just 'dog'? 

Well to be honest I had less of a problem with the English articles personally because I learned English after German so I had already encountered articles in German and thus knew what the deal was, sort of. 

Anyway, I want to share a little algorithm, for lack of a better word, here with you all for how to decide which article to use and when. 

It's a quick and dirty set of steps for how to use articles with common nouns (as opposed to proper nouns or names), so here goes:

You basically ask yourself a series of questions like so:

1) Is this noun unique in this context? - if the answer is yes then just use 'the' and forgeddaboudid.

If the answer is no then the next thing we want to know is

2) Is this noun uncountable? - if the answer is yes  use 'nothing' or the so called 'zero article';

if the answer is no and you have a countable noun then

3) Is this countable noun plural? - if the answer is yes then use 'nothing' or 'zero article'

And if the answer is no, i.e. you've got a singular countable noun that's not unique in the given context then use 'a' or 'an' depending on whether the first sound in your noun ( or noun group) is a vowel or a consonant. 

Like I said it's a quick and dirty algorithm and it glosses over quite a few nuances. Like what does it mean for a noun to be 'unique' in the given context? Well, what I mean by this is that your noun answers the question which (one) as opposed to answering the question 'what is it?

Basically whenever you're naming something, that is whenever you're saying what something is you use the indefinite or 'classifying' article. Now here the nuance is that the 'visible' form of this article, i.e. a/an derived from the word for 'one' (1) and English has no indefinite/classifying article form for plural or uncountable nouns. You might say that when you're saying what something is and that something is plural or uncountable our 'classifying/indefinite' article becomes 'invisible'. It's sort of implied but it's not really there. 

And then when you are saying which thing you're talking about, when it's the only one (unique) in the given context you just use 'the' and you don't have to care about whether your noun is plural or singular, countable or uncountable. 

A very simple example:

What is this?  - > this is a table : you're saying what it is.

Is the table big? - > we both know which table I'm talking about, it's now 'unique' in this context.

Yes it is big, it is a big table - here, it's the same table we're talking about but I'm now renaming/reclassifying it, earlier I said it was a table, just a table, now I'm saying that the table is a big table.

Btw, note how this simple example sort of flies in the face of the disappointingly misguided 'rule' found in many a textbook that supposedly you use a/an when you mention something for the first time and after that you're supposed to say 'the' when talking about the same thing - that's total BS, as it depends on what you're trying to say. 

And last but not least, the countability vs uncountability of nouns. It's important to understand here that practically any noun in English can be either countable or uncountable depending on what you're trying to say. Like chicken, for example. Someone may have a pet chicken (countable), while someone else may have chicken for breakfast (meaning chicken meat - uncountable), or you can talk about how someone may technically be a man but he's still not man enough to face up to his father. 

My eureka moment with learning English came when I'd been learning it on a daily basis for several months. It was back when paper books were still big and the Internet was slow and mostly empty. I went into this book store and saw a textbook titled Progressive English for Adult Learners by A.S. Hornby. It consisted of three volumes and it was relatively cheap so I bought it.

What made this specific textbook different from all the others I had used up to that point was that it was all in English. There was not a single word of Russian in it, no translations, no nothing. All new words that were introduced in the topics were 'explained' in the footnotes. 

So I started working through it. It starts out really slow, with the conjugation of the to be verb and then builds everything else on that. Before long I was hooked in the sense I found myself actually enjoying working with this textbook. Most of the other textbooks I had used before that I had gotten tired of and ditched after working through the first few lessons. With Progressive English for Adult Learners, however, I actually was able to work through the whole thing. And, more importantly, it completely changed my ideas about what is the best way to learn English and my attitude to English.

Like most people, at first I viewed English as a kind of annex to be added on top of my Russian. Like I think in Russian and English is just this weird that you get when you replace all the Russian words with their English 'equivalents.' A kind of an extension to my Russian. Thus, whenever I came across a new word in English my gut instinct was always to look up the Russian translation for it. The fact that oftentimes a word would have a very long list of possible translation did bother me at the back of my mind but I honestly didn't know what to make of it. It clashed with my view that English was just an extension of Russian for me but it wasn't really causing me that much of a problem, at least not at first. 

And here was a book that taught English first through pictures and then through English. I mean it was mind boggling at first, a complete paradigm shift. It presented English not as an extension on top of Russian but as a completely independent and self-sufficient linguistic system that didn't depend on Russian in any way. Once this realisation dawned on me there was no going back: suddenly all those other text books chock full of Russian translations and explanations in Russia were no longer any good. Suddenly, Russian was distracting, it's like a switch was thrown in my head and saw with uncanny clarity that when there was Russian in a textbook and translations were offered all over the place it actually meant I had to make double the effort than was needed when I only worked in English: think about it how much time and effort gets spent, well essentially wasted, when you are constantly having to go back and forth between English and your native language. 

And that was that, from that moment on I've always kept Russian and English in separate compartments in my brain and never looked back. And it actually helped me achieve a quantum leap in my English proficiency. You change your attitude, you begin to regard English as an independent self sufficient language that you can use for 'anything' and something changes in your brain. It goes from treating it as a subject of study to treating it as a full blown language and that is when, in my opinion, language acquisition proper begins.