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Re:Parents now spend twice as much time with their children ... by chrisseaton on Wednesday November 29, 2017 @03:48AM (#15805536)
Why do people write ‘baby’ or ‘newborn’ with no article like that? Surely it’s ‘a baby’ or ‘the baby’ or ‘your baby’ or maybe ‘babies’ if you mean in general. Just ‘baby’ sounds like broken English. You wouldn’t write ‘manager sent me an email’, you’d write ‘my manager’ or something like that with an article.
Re:Parents now spend twice as much time with their children ... by ordu on Wednesday November 29, 2017 @07:09AM (#15806192)
I'm really glad to get feedback from English native. I'm even more happy because your feedback confirms my expectations: articles are really hard for me, because my first language does not have them.
Re:Parents now spend twice as much time with their children ... by elboru on Wednesday November 29, 2017 @11:21AM (#15807973)
I'm a Spanish native speaker and I also have problems with articles, but it seems like I have the opposite problem, it seems like Spanish uses articles more often than English, so I usually add them when they are not required, maybe not grammatically incorrect but sometimes I could sound kinda weird.
Re:Parents now spend twice as much time with their children ... by tome on Wednesday November 29, 2017 @04:54AM (#15805742)
> sounds like broken English

There are many languages (notably Slavic ones) that don't have articles. My guess is that the comment author is a native speaker of one of those languages and not English.

Re:Parents now spend twice as much time with their children ... by chrisseaton on Wednesday November 29, 2017 @05:38AM (#15805897)
Lots of native English speakers write ‘baby’ without an article.
Re:Parents now spend twice as much time with their children ... by dragandj on Wednesday November 29, 2017 @05:38AM (#15805899)
As a native speaker of a Slavic language I can confirm that articles are something that I often seem to be getting wrong when I am writing (and speaking) English.

They seem like an unneeded extra, from the perspective of Slavic languages, where the information that they give is most often easily inferred from the context or the construction of the sentence.

Re:Parents now spend twice as much time with their children ... by selimthegrim on Wednesday November 29, 2017 @09:35AM (#15807045)
Indian languages also lack articles - my mother immigrated to USA over 30 years ago and I still have to add in articles sometimes when I proofread something she writes.
Re:Parents now spend twice as much time with their children ... by andrewmu on Thursday November 30, 2017 @04:54AM (#15814623)
To be fair, some English speakers will say baby to mean a particular unnamed infant. For example, a midwife or childcare adviser will talk about what to do "when baby gets home" or "If baby is hungry.." etc.
Re:Parents now spend twice as much time with their children ... by NLips on Wednesday November 29, 2017 @04:20AM (#15805634)
The whole comment is written with fewer articles than you'd expect for good English - my guess is that the commenter is not a native speaker, rather than trying to be cutesy.
Re:Parents now spend twice as much time with their children ... by skinner_ on Wednesday November 29, 2017 @09:49PM (#15813075)
Now that's the real difference between a native and a non-native speaker: As a non-native speaker, I'd probably put about the right amount of articles in there, but I can't even imagine why dropping them sounds 'cutesy'. Probably most of my sentences randomly project 'cutesy' or 'geeky' or 'obnoxious'. And it happens on a subconscious level even if you know that I'm not a native speaker.
Re:Parents now spend twice as much time with their children ... by taejo on Thursday November 30, 2017 @08:16AM (#15815436)
Referring to "a baby" as "baby" is cutesy because it kind of treats "baby" as a name, or perhaps because it immitates the way young children talk. In normal circumstances dropping articles just makes you sound foreign.