A difficult concept for me -- Articles The most typical hurdle for Japanese English-learners is "articles". I think we don’t have any interchangeable concepts in Japanese and the patterns of "a" or "the" seems to be very tricky for me. Additionally countable and uncountable nouns make this issue more difficult for me. I already understand the basis of this concept. Article is one of the most important components in English and it may change the meaning of a whole sentence. For example, if you put “the” instead of “a”, you mean a specific thing. -I want to go to a restaurant( any restaurants work for you) -I want to go to the restaurant(you mean the specific restaurant which you mentioned before or your favourite one) And if you say "I like the dog", it means you like the specific dog. (maybe the Yorkshire terrier in your gland mother’s house?). If you want to mean, you like any dogs generally , -I love dogs. And you can't say "I love a dog.". It seems to be very simple so far but in some cases, it’s definitely confusing. For example, "sea", "beach", "sky", "space", "galaxy" I always get confused whether I should put 'a' or 'the'. Furthermore, uncountable nouns like "information", "software" and "effort" make me mad!