Section Warm-Up

Indefinite Articles

In El Día y La Fecha, you learned that all nouns in Spanish have a gender. They are either masculine or feminine.   Here are a few examples:

el niño – the boy
la niña- the girl
los amigos- the friends
las amigas – the girl friends

Do you remember that we called "el, la, los, las" definite articles? They mean "the" in English. In this section, you will be working with the articles of clothing vocabulary and indefinite articles; or a, an, some in English. In English, we can leave out the articles (both definite and indefinite) at times, but in Spanish they are used more frequently so we need to learn about them. Looking at the word list below, see if you can guess what the words mean in English. Click on each word to see what its meaning is.

1. un niño   a boy
2. una niña   a girl
3. unos amigos   some friends
4. unas niñas   some girls
5. un profesor   a male teacher
6. una profesora   a female teacher
7. unos profesores   some teachers
8. un lunes   a Monday
9. unos jueves   some Thursdays

If you begin to try to figure out why things are either masculine or feminine, you will soon go crazy. Just learn the words as they are and learn the gender along with it. How are you going to learn the gender along with the word? Pay close attention to the article that comes with it. If it has un or el in front of it, it is masculine. If it has una or la in front of it, it is feminine.