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If you see English written without articles (‘the’ and ‘a’) by someone who is ‘an American’, it was probably written by a Russian. It’s very easy to spot non-native English writing if you’re a native speaker.

It’s such an old concept that it’s written about in the Bible (Old Testament), referred to as a ‘shibboleth’, which in that case was a spoken word that revealed the native language of someone due to their inability to pronounce the word like a native speaker.



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