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Bonjour! Today we will discover a cool secret about French: every single noun has a gender, and its partner article always matches it!
In English, we use the word 'the' for everything, like 'the book' or 'the table'. In French, all nouns are either masculine (boy) or feminine (girl). This is called grammatical gender.
To say 'the' in French, we choose a partner word based on gender. We use 'le' for masculine nouns, and 'la' for feminine nouns. Watch how the matching articles fly to their partner words!
What happens if a word starts with a vowel like A, E, I, O, or U? To make it easy to say, both 'le' and 'la' shrink down and pop into 'l' with an apostrophe. This is called elision.
Determine the correct French article ('le', 'la', or 'l'') for the following three singular nouns: 1) 'crayon' (pencil, masculine), 2) 'chaise' (chair, feminine), and 3) 'ordinateur' (computer, masculine).
- Look at the first noun: 'crayon'. We are told it is masculine, and it starts with a consonant 'c'. Since it is masculine, we pair it with the masculine article 'le' to make 'le crayon'.
- Look at the second noun: 'chaise'. We are told it is feminine, and it starts with the consonant 'ch'. Since it is feminine, we pair it with the feminine article 'la' to make 'la chaise'.
- Look at the third noun: 'ordinateur'. We are told it is masculine, but wait! It starts with the vowel 'o'.
- Because 'ordinateur' starts with a vowel, we cannot use 'le'. We must shorten the article to 'l'' to make 'l'ordinateur'.
