Talk:よすが

@Poketalker Hi. Thanks for your expansion of the entry. I'd like to know why the article “a/an” is used in the definition lines? Japanese nouns generally have no number, and even for languages with numbers, such as the French entry dictionnaire, the translation part (“dictionary”) does not use the article; only the gloss part (“a list of words” or “an associative array”) does. --Dine2016 (talk) 01:59, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

@Dine2016, that's only my usual preference. If there was a modifier to make the noun plural, it would be otherwise. ～ POKéTalker（═◉═） 05:55, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

@Poketalker: Um, I prefer to omit the article because, given a Japanese noun such as 猫(ねこ) (neko), you don't know if it will be translated into English as “a cat”, “the cat”, or “cats”, so “cat” in the definition line is probably more neutral. On the other hand, supplying the article “a/an” seems to be a common practice in Japanese-English dictionaries. --Dine2016 (talk) 09:21, 2 January 2019 (UTC)