Growing up, I was always under the belief that an a preceded consonants, and an preceded vowels. An owl, a telephone. But I was wrong.
It turns out that it isn’t the letter that matters, but the sound. That is why we say an hour, because the h is silent, and we are really saying our.
I came across this while crushing my DuoLingo and learning how to talk about money and what things cost. One of the sentences I came across was talking about a bag costing a euro (bargain!). My first thought was, shouldn’t it be an euro? But that seemed very weird, and a quick bit of research proved to me that while I had been successfully applying a grammatical rule, I didn’t fully understand it.
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