I was watching an English teaching video, they said:
How often do you go to the Cinema?
And after a while, they said:
How often do you go to work?
Why they didn't use the definite article the before work?
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Rickless
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Related: [the top levels of government — why not “of THE government”?](https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/52263/the-top-levels-of-government-why-not-of-the-government)and [He went to work vs. went to the work](https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/96216/he-went-to-work-vs-went-to-the-work) – Mari-Lou A Jun 23 '18 at 21:07
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1See No. 8 in @Matt's answer : [*Some nouns are used without articles to indicate that they are being used in idiomatic form*](https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/10483/1694) – Mari-Lou A Jun 23 '18 at 21:27
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@Mari-LouA Indeed, Matt's answer helped me. But, shriek's answer have helped me too. – Rickless Jun 27 '18 at 19:05
1 Answers
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In the first sentence, "the" is used before a place, in this case the cinema. Similarly, you could ask "how often do you go to the beach?" or "how often do you go to the mall?"
In the second sentence, "the" is omitted because "work" in this sentence is not a place, but a synonym for "your job." So, this sentence could be rewritten as:
How often do you go to your job?
Of course, most people do work in a place, so if you wanted to use the structure from first sentence, you could say something like:
How often do you go to the office?
depending on where someone works.
