“How about taking a walk in the nature?”

One of the first things I noticed about typical Finnish English is that many people tend to say “the nature” when they are talking about the natural world around us, otherwise known as the great outdoors. This is also true of many Swedish speakers and German speakers and many speakers of some other languages. But the problem here is that in English we just say “nature” when we mean the world outside our towns and cities.

This is an easy mistake to make, especially for speakers of a language like Finnish that doesn’t tend to use articles— “a,” “an,” “the” —before nouns. But even when you are aware of general English rules of usage, there is no easy way to figure out whether to use “the” before “nature.” One common understanding is that you don’t use an article for large abstract or indefinite concepts that cannot be counted, such as “heaven,” “money,” “sugar,” and—as it turns out— “nature.” You wouldn’t say “I can’t wait to get to the heaven” or even “a heaven” because the word “heaven” refers to something which in common Anglo-European thinking, dominated for centuries by Christian perspectives, cannot by definition be counted because there is only one heaven. In the early Renaissance, on the other hand, it was quite common to speak of a number of heavens: “I am in seventh heaven!”

You would say “I love money” because in this case you just mean money in general. But if I owe you money, you could and would say “Give me the money!” In this case, we are both speaking about a certain amount of money and not just money in general. In the same vein, you would say “I love sugar” when you mean sweet foods in general (I will talk about when to say “foods” rather than “food” in another post), but if we were sitting together at the dinner table you would say, “Please pass the sugar.” You don’t want all the sugar in the world at this moment but that particular amount of sugar in the sugar bowl.

Things get more confusing, though, when we say “I love the world.” The world is big and general, just like nature, but we nevertheless say “the” world and not “I love world.” We say “I love the city” even when we mean city life and not a specific city—we don’t say “I love city.” But if we love the world outside the city, we say “I love nature.” Danged if I know why!

Perhaps even more confusing is that we can and do say “I love the nature of sugar” or “I love the nature of politics” or even “I love the nature of nature.” In this case, the phrase “the nature” refers to a set of qualities specific to a given thing, such as ducks or donuts or dirigibles. In the case of this particular post, you could say that I love the nature of unexpected quirks of language, especially when they pose difficulties in translation.

In practice, of course, native English speakers would understand what you mean if you said “I like to spend time in the nature.” And unless they are acting as a teacher or an editor of the language—like me—they would most likely be polite enough not to point out your error. But they would notice it. And depending on the nature of your writing task—ha! “the nature of . . .” !—this might or might not be a fatal mistake.

But if you want to have your writing be received as clearly and smoothly as possible, it is important to learn about and avoid such little quirks of the English language.