Less vs Fewer | English Grammar Lesson

Hey. Hi. How's it going? Welcome Eat Sleep Dreamers to another English lesson with Tom.

Today we're looking at a piece of grammar that my family make mistakes with. My friends

make mistakes with. Even I sometimes make mistakes with this.

That's right we're looking at less versus fewer today. Now the number one thing that you need to know right now

is the difference between countable nouns and uncountable nouns. Countable nouns are

things that you can count so for example one book, two books, three books. Books are countable,

we can count them. Other things that are countable are apples, cars, Facebook friends, Instagram

followers you get the idea. Uncountable nouns are things that you can't count for example

sleep, fun, time, money and lots of food items so milk, sugar, wine things like that.

But hold on! We can make uncountable nouns countable. For example, wine it's an uncountable

word, uncountable noun. If we want to make it countable we could say glasses of wine.

So 'I've had two glasses of wine'. So now it becomes countable. Another example information

is uncountable. To make that countable we might say pieces of information so 'I have

two pieces of information for you today'. Now it becomes countable. So when do we use

fewer? Well we use fewer with countable nouns. So for example 'I've got fewer Facebook friends

than you do'. And as you see there Facebook friends countable noun so we are using fewer.

Therefore we use less with uncountable nouns for example 'I'm trying to eat less sugar.'

As you can see there sugar is uncountable so we use less. Let's look at a word that

can be both countable and uncountable. Let's take water. Ok, so when we use it in an uncountable

way we might say 'I used to drink less water.' Water there is uncountable. If it's countable

I might say glasses of water so for example 'I used to drink fewer glasses of water' and

glasses makes it countable. Ok we're going to do a little test for you guys at home.

Now you have got to decide is the missing word fewer or less? And remember you have

to think is the noun countable or uncountable. Ok are you ready? Here we go!

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guys thank you so much for hanging out with me. This is Tom the English Hipster saying

goodbye.