And a simple way to understand the rules (when to use and which articles to use)
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Articles specify a grammatical quality called ‘definiteness’ which basically means whether or not we know which thing is being referred to by a noun. So “he threw a ball at my face. The ball was red,” – in the first sentence the ball is new information, we don’t know yet which ball is being referred to, so the noun is indefinite, and has ‘a/an’ to show this. In the second sentence we already know which one is being referred to so the noun is definite and has the definite marker, ‘the’.
This can carry a surprising amount of meaning. If you say “there was a man at the door last night,” the implication is that either the speaker or the listener doesn’t know who this man was. They were just the generic “a man”. If you say “the man was here last night” it’s implied that we both know who we’re talking about – this is a specific man known to us who has been referred to previously. “Pass me a plate” means you’re using ‘plate’ generically and you’ll take any of the plates that are available, but if you’ve already touched one you would probably say “My plate is the one on the left,” using the definite article to refer to a specific one
Annoyingly we do use definiteness in strange ways sometimes. For example we go to “the cinema” and Americans would ask to be taken to “the hospital”, as if there is only one cinema and one hospital in every city and we all know which one we’re talking about. But we also go “to school” or “to prison”, with no article, as if these are abstract ideas rather than concrete places. Children might “jump on the bed” but tired adults will “lie in bed”, and despite both of these being activities involving beds, the first is almost always used with “the” and the second never is. So… sorry, I guess
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