There Is And There Are

On using "there is" and "there are" in real English

The verb "to be" changes depending on what comes after it, not what comes before. That single fact trips up most learners I've ever worked with. I once corrected a student who wrote "there is many problems with this approach" for the third time that week. It wasn't about laziness. It was about how Portuguese speakers are trained to think about existence. In Portuguese you say "há muitos problemas" and the verb sits at the front. In English, "there" is just a placeholder subject. The real subject arrives after the verb. This is why the inversion feels so unnatural when you're translating from your native language. I've been teaching this since 2008, and I still see the same mistake pattern every semester.

there is and there are: the core rule nobody explains simply

Use "there is" when the noun following it is singular or uncountable. Use "there are" when the noun following it is plural. That's it. That's the entire rule. The word "there" does not carry meaning by itself here. It exists only to satisfy English's requirement that every sentence have a subject before the verb. Consider these examples. "There is a book on the table." One book, singular. "There are books on the table." Multiple books, plural. "There is water in the glass." Water is uncountable, so it takes the singular verb regardless. "There are people waiting outside." Plural noun, plural verb. The pattern is mechanical once you stop overthinking it.

Now let me tell you about the thing that actually causes problems in practice. When the noun is a compound subject connected by "or" or "nor," the verb agrees with the noun closest to it. "There is a pen or two notebooks on the desk." The closest noun to the verb is "a pen," which is singular, so you use "is." Flip it around and it changes. "There are two notebooks or a pen on the desk." Now the closest noun is "two notebooks," so you use "are." I learned this the hard way when I was proofreading a technical manual and missed this exact construction three times before catching it. Another edge case that catches everyone out: collective nouns and amounts of money. You'll see sentences like "There is fifty dollars on the counter" even though fifty dollars is technically plural in form. Here the amount functions as a single unit, so singular is correct. Similarly, "There is ten years of experience on this résumé." Ten years is a period of time treated as one block. The grammar follows sense, not strict number agreement, and that's something nobody puts in beginner textbooks.

Here's what I wish I'd known earlier about this structure. You can absolutely use "there is" in casual spoken English with plural nouns. Native speakers do it constantly. "There's two things I need to tell you" is grammatically loose but wildly common in conversation. Written English, especially academic and professional contexts, demands strict agreement. If you're writing an email to a client or a paper for publication, stick to the formal rule. If you're chatting at a bar, "there's" with plurals won't get you judged harshly by anyone who speaks the language natively. The contraction creates another subtle issue. When you write "there's," you lose the ability to signal plurality through the verb. This is why some style guides recommend avoiding "there's" with plural complements in formal writing. Not because it's wrong per se, but because it obscures the grammatical relationship between subject and verb. Readability suffers slightly when the reader has to mentally reassemble what the contraction collapsed.

I also want to mention a limitation of the "there is/are" construction that many instructors skip. It's inherently static. It describes existence or presence but says nothing about action. If you find yourself writing sentences like "There is a man standing at the door" repeatedly, consider whether a direct subject-verb construction would be sharper. "A man stands at the door" carries the same information with more energy and fewer words. The "there is/are" pattern works fine for establishing setting or listing items, but overusing it makes prose feel padded and indirect. Negation follows the same agreement rules. "There isn't any milk left" because milk is uncountable. "There aren't any cookies left" because cookies are plural. The contraction splits differently depending on whether you're negating singular or plural, which is another detail learners routinely mix up. I once saw a test where a student wrote "there isn't any errors" and lost points not because the meaning was unclear but because the agreement was wrong. Meaning and grammar are separate grading criteria in most formal assessments.

Questions invert the structure. "Is there a problem?" for singular or uncountable. "Are there any problems?" for plural. The same agreement logic applies, just with the verb moving to the front. This inversion is where pronunciation becomes tricky for non-native speakers because the consonant cluster in "are there" requires a clean transition that doesn't exist in the affirmative form. If you're studying this on your own, I'd suggest a practical exercise. Take a photo of any room in your house and describe everything in it using both forms. Start with "there is" for singular and uncountable items. Move to "there are" for plural items. Then negate both. Then turn them into questions. Doing this for five different rooms in one sitting will burn the pattern into your memory faster than any grammar table ever could. I've recommended this to dozens of students and the retention rate is noticeably higher than with rote conjugation drills.

One final thing that beginners consistently miss: "there" in this construction is never stressed in natural speech. It's pronounced as a weak syllable, usually reduced to something close to "der" or even just a breathy release. The stress lands on the noun that follows. "There IS a DOG outside" sounds robotic. "There's a DOG outside" is how a native speaker would actually say it. If your listening comprehension feels weak, pay attention to how heavily or lightly "there" is pronounced in context. It's a small signal that reveals whether someone is reading from a textbook or actually speaking.