For Beginners
ADJECTIVES AND ARTICLES
French is a complex language, as
difficult to learn as English is for non-native speakers. Fortunately,
however, French and English do share a lot in common, including a lot
of the same words, and in some cases similar sentence set-ups. The
first thing that's important to know is how to set up a sentence. If
you know how sentences are set up in French, you'll have no problem
understanding sentences later to come in songs! I color-coded this
sentence to show you where the different words go. Nouns are in blue,
adjectives in red, and verbs in green:
The red pencil is on the brown table.
Le crayon rouge est sur la table marron.
There are two things you need to pick up on in this sentence. For one, the adjectives and the nouns switch places from the English to the French. (What I mean is, the French sentence literally says: "The pencil red is on the table brown.") This is a general rule in French, but with a few well-known exceptions called BAGS adjectives.
The other thing to pick up on is that there are two different words for "the" used in that sentence. That's because French nouns have genders, and there are feminine and masculine words. When you're talking about "the pencil", that's a masculine noun, so you have to say "le" for "the." When you're talking about "the table", though, that's a feminine noun, and so you have to say "la" instead. English nouns have no genders so this is something that a lot of foreign language students struggle with (myself included, sometimes). There really is no way to know whether a noun will be feminine or masculine, because there's no definite rhyme or reason to it. One thing that I've noticed from my time studying French is that if a noun ends with an "e" (for example, la table), it will USUALLY be feminine. This is by no means an all-the-time occurrence, and it can't be counted on dependably because there are tons of exceptions, but it's a good little trick if you're really stumped.
Sometimes, though, you'll want to talk about more than one thing, and so you need to know how to refer to a group. Say that there's more than one pencil on that desk. Here's what you do:
The red pencils are on the brown table.
Les crayons rouges sont sur la table marron.
Yep, quite a few s's showed up
there. When you make a noun plural, you have to say "les" instead of
"la" or "le" (this is regardless of gender, les is for both le and
la). You also usually have to add an s to the noun, as well as the
adjective, because the adjective and the noun ALWAYS match in gender and number! Click here for more information on this rule, because it's very important.
So now you know how to say "the". But maybe you don't want to be specific, maybe you want to just say "a pencil" or "a table". This is simple to remember but really important. For feminine nouns, you use "une", and for masculine nouns, you use "un". So I'll change our sentence up a bit to show you how to use it:
A red pencil is on a brown table.
Un crayon rouge est sur une table marron.
Last article to learn: "des". This is the plural of "un" and "une", and it basically just means "some". If you want to talk about "some pencils", then you say "des crayons". "Des" is a combination of the words "de" (of) and "les" (the). Think about it, it makes sense that "of the pencils" = some pencils!
Well, that's all I have to say about articles and adjectives on this page. If you feel like you just don't get what I'm talking about or if anything's unclear, here are a few links for you to check out:
If that doesn't work out for some reason, please email me! Hopefully I'll be able to help you. Bonne chance (good luck)!
