How to Use Japanese Articles

"YUU ASAKURA: I'd like to take a moment to talk about articles. In English, before a countable noun, you put "a" or "an," or if it's plural, you put "S" at the end. And in Japanese, we don't really care too much about the number, unless it's really important. Let's say this is an apple. You have to say an apple. We say, "kore wa ringo desu." And first of all, from the word "kore," we know that it's singular, but also--unless it's a thousand or a million apples, it's not really a big issue to specify the number. And the same reason applies with "the," because from the context, we know that if we're talking about an apple or the apple. And also, I want to mention, we use these two to point out something very important. We learned the word this and that as now. These two are before now, the difference is this is an apple, and this apple is red. So in that case, this, in Japanese, "kono." We learned the word "kore" before, but in this case, you change this to "kono." And the same reason, "that" changes to "ano." Keep those two words in mind."