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[RedKing]

Long story short: English is an evil and sadistic language that is both grammatically complex and easily mutated, leading to the horrid mess of loopholes and contratictory rules we have today. And it does not help that schools try to reverse what changes take place, such as the growing acceptance of using a conjunction to start a sentance.

I believe this sums up the core problem:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Muz]

English is an ugly, messy language. It just shines in that it's fairly easy to learn. I don't even bother with the rules;

[ILikePie]

We should all just drop English and speak Esperanto or something. Or maybe sign language, it doesn't have any grammatical rules at all.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

On second thought, perhaps I shouldn't risk starting a flame war.

[ein]

I like English.
It's such an amalgamation that it can take words from other languages and still sound correct.

[RedKing]

After all, if the Founding Fathers hadn't fought the good fight against the British, we'd all be speaking...umm....hmm. Slight oversight there.

[Fossaman]

I find that looking at the purpose of the a/an distinction helps to decide when to use it. For example, if I say 'a apple' it comes out 'uh *glottal stop* apple' and I sound like a hillbilly. So I say 'an apple' and the consonant n naturally divides the two words.

[ILikePie]

It'll always sound funny when you've got the same sound at the end of one word, and at the start of another.

[Armok]

Lojban.

[ed boy]

Lojban.

What‽

[G-Flex]

I have noticed some inconsistency about whether a or an is used in conjunciton with acronyms. Consider the following sentences:

Doom is a FPS
Doom is an FPS

The first sentence is technically correct - F is a constonant, so it is more suitable to use "a" instead of "an". However, people are more likely to use the second sentence. When speaking this is understandable, as phonetically it is correct (FPS is Eff-Pee-Ess), but when typing or writing, some people say "an". I have noticed that people with english as their first language are more likely to do this.

So, Bay12: What do you lot do with your acronyms?

The first one is not technically correct. You use "an" when  it's a vowel sound, and "a" when it's a consonant sound. I'm using double-markup for a reason! If this weren't true, then it would be "an universe" and "an unit", not "a unit" and "a universe". It goes by the sound, not by the letter; doing it any other way would be silly.

There are a lot of weirdass things about English, but this honestly isn't one of them. If it starts with a vowel sound, then you use "an". Otherwise, use "a".

[ed boy]

But you get some people who promounce the same thing in different ways. For example, when saying the word horrible, some people tend to pronouce it as 'orrible', leading to the need to use an instead of a.

[Rose]

and that, my friend, is how accents get into text.

[G-Flex]

But you get some people who promounce the same thing in different ways. For example, when saying the word horrible, some people tend to pronouce it as 'orrible', leading to the need to use an instead of a.

Yeah, that's a good point. However, you're still going by pronunciation there, so you're fine just doing it however you pronounce the word (or however it's pronounced in the dialect you're going for).

[lordnincompoop]

I usually write it as it's said, so I use 'an FPS' and 'a first person shooter'.

As for the h, I just fudge it and it usually comes out right for me.