1.2 - Estructuras - los artículos

 Estructuras - los artículos

 

Empezamos con un repaso sencillo. In Spanish 10, you learned about definite and indefinite articles. These are the short words that come before our nouns (los sustantivos); its the way of saying in English, “the” or “a/an/some”.

 

In Spanish, definite and indefinite articles reflect both the gender (masculine or feminine) and number (singular or plural) of the noun. Remember a noun is a word that identifies people, animals, places, things or ideas. Nouns can be living or non-living things.

 

Artículos definidos ("the")		Artículos indefinidos (“a/an/some”)
el gato	the cat (male)	un gato	a cat (male)
la gata	the cat (female)	una gata	a cat (female)
los gatos	the cats (all male, or male and female)	unos gatos	some cats (all male, or male and female)
las gata	the cats (all female)	unas gatas	some cats (all female)

 

All nouns have a gender (masculine or feminine). Click on the rows to see some examples in each group.

 

Masculine nouns (el hombre)

 

Feminine nouns (la mujer)

 

OJO: A word that has an ‘o’ or an ‘a’ ending is a good trick to help us determine gender, is not always a guaranteed way of knowing the gender of the noun. As you can see in the chart above, some words do not end in an ‘o’ or an ‘a’, like “país”; here you have to learn that it is masculine (el país / un país). Or, some words end in an “o” or an “a” and it is the opposite gender! For example: el tema (m); la mano (f). It is a good idea to learn the nouns with their corresponding definite article (el or la).