Some Advice Or Some Advices?

"Advice" doesn't have a plural. It's always "advice", no matter what. It used to have a plural, but we don't use it anymore.

The word "advice" is always singular. Common uses of it would be, "can you give me some advice?", "let me give you a piece of advice", or "I'm going to give you a few pieces of advice." One common mistake people make, even people fluent in English, is to confuse the word "advice" with "advise". Advice is the noun version, it's what you are "given". "Advise" is the verb version, it's what someone does to give you advice.

So you can be given advice, but the person giving you the advice is "advising" you. Let me know if you're still confused by this.

-Dru

You generally shouldn't say "advices". "Advice" is what is called a non-count noun. See this page for information on this: http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/noncountnoun.htm.

I think it's more common to say "some advice" than "some pieces of advice", but they're both common enough for most English-speakers to understand. I think you might use "some pieces of advice" if you are going to give a list of specific advice.

I hope that helps!

チェルシー
Dru Solis
Poobah

Thank you for the corrections and clear explanations.
I was about to find the answer by myself in the dictionary and through the Net.
However, I changed my mind that the best answer would be given by posting this entry.
You helped me a lot.

The word "advice" is a mass noun, like "water" and "sand" and "stuff" and "furniture" and "poultry". As such, it is neither singular nor plural, because the stuff it refers to isn't discretely countable. You can't have "one advice" or "two advices" any more than you can have one art or two maths. It's just advice. You can have some number of *pieces* of advice, just as you can have one quart of water or two quarts of milk or three head of cattle.

So "some advice" is correct.

If "advices" were a word, it would refer to different kinds of advice, but frankly I'm not sure it's a word at all. I've neither seen it in print nor heard it in conversation, and I've been studying English for a veritable coon's age.

Jonadab
Thank you for your explanation.
Mass nouns utterly confuse me.
Well, what’s the meaning of a veritable coon’s age?
I’ve never heard it.

Sorry for my mistake!
I've never known about that.
You can delete it if you need...

ごめんなさい！

ジャック
It’s OK.
I learned a lot from it.
I hope this helps you, too.

> Well, what’s the meaning of a veritable coon’s age?

A "coon's age" is a rural American colloquialism. It just means a long time. The word "veritable" literally means "true" and/or "verifiable", but in this case it's just used as an intensifier, to make the whole thing more emphatic. If a coon's age is a long time, then a veritable coon's age is really a long time.

> Mass nouns utterly confuse me.

Really it's quite simple: certain nouns in English don't refer to countable items, but just to the stuff in general, as a kind of substance -- a mass of whatever. Words like this don't have singular and plural forms, because they don't have grammatical number, because they don't refer to countable items, but to a kind of thing or substance.

For instance, if I say that my mom's kitchen table is made out of wood, that doesn't imply anything about how many pieces it might have. In fact, my mom's kitchen table happens to be extendable via a number of separate boards that can be inserted into the middle (you pull the two ends apart, add the extra boards, and push it back together), so that you can make the table larger when you have a lot of people to feed and then make it smaller again for regular use so it doesn't (usually) take up all that space. Nonetheless, I wouldn't say that my mom's table is made out of "woods", because (in this context) the word "wood" is a mass noun -- it refers to the *kind* of material the table is made out of, not to the individual pieces.

Probably the best example is "water", because "water" is an inherently continuous substance. No matter how small an amount of it you have, you can always have half as much of it, and it's still water. (Well, unless you have a high-end physics lab and can isolate individual molecules, but the English language developed before that kind of technology existed.) So if you have twice as much water, you still have "water". It's not something you can count, like one, two, three, etc. If I have a cup of water, and you have twice as much, you have a pint of water. We can also say two cups, or three cups, but there it's the *cup* that's the countable item, not the water.

Actually, the idea of nouns that don't have grammatical number should come natural to you, if you're Japanese, because Japanese nouns don't really have number. They word forms are neither singular nor plural. Your pronouns have number (compare 私 versus 私たち), but your nouns don't. So in a way Japanese nouns are like the mass nouns in English. (Well, sort of. You do use numbers with them, though; we don't use numbers with mass nouns in English, unless there's a counter word.)

Yeah! I can learn a lot from your entries...
Thanks! ^_^