One of the first things that you should know about the French language is that every noun is defined by one of two articles: the feminine "la" or the masculine "le." In addition, there is a plural form, "les," that encompasses both masculine and feminine nouns.
Whenever you're learning new vocabulary you should be sure that you pay attention to the articles of your nouns... not only will your sentence structure depend on whether the noun is masculine or feminine, but the French will be taken aback (and a bit offended in some cases) if you assign the wrong article to a word.
Sometimes you will be able to guess the gender of the noun based on whether the word is referring to a male or a female. For example:
le père / le papa (father/dad)
l'homme [m] (man)
le mari (husband)
le garçon (boy)
le fils (son)
le grand-père (grandfather)
and
la mère / la maman (mother/mom)
la femme (woman/wife)
la fille (girl/daughter)
la grand-mère (grandmother)
In other cases, however, the gender of the word isn't as obvious and the article will simply have to be memorized as part of the noun. For example:
le chat (cat)
le chien (dog)
l'arbre [m] (tree)
la maison (house)
l'école [f] (school)
la rue (street)
If you wanted to use the article "a" instead of the article "the," you would use une (feminine form) or un (masculine form). So la mère would be une mère and le père would be un père. The plural form is des: les femmes would change to des femmes (translated as "some women.")
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