Basic French 1. The Articles
From scratch.
The first awkward thing about French when your native language is English, is coming to terms with the whole idea of gender and agreement, but it’s not quite as bad as it looks. There are four kinds altogether, and we’ll get to them all in time, but just to give you an idea of the range, they are
- Articles, which always appear alongside nouns (always agree)
- Adjectives, which always appear alongside nouns (always agree)
- Pronouns that stand instead of nouns (mostly agree, a few not)
- Participles in compound tenses of verbs (agree in certain cases)
In French, every noun comes in either masculine or feminine, and the definite and indefinite article has to agree with the gender, in singular or plural, of the noun it appears with.
English nouns don’t have gender, and the definite article makes no distinction for singular and plural. The house. The houses. But French has different words for the masculine, the feminine and the plural.
Definite article: The
le (masc. singular beginning with a consonant)
la (fem. singular beginning with a consonant)
l’ (masc. or fem. singular beginning with a vowel)
les (masc. or fem. plural)
Indefinite article: a or an
un (masc. singular)
une (fem. singular)
des (masc. and fem. plural)
Part article: some
du (masc. noun beginning with a consonant)
de la (fem. noun beginning with a consonant)
de l’ (masc. or fem. noun beginning with a vowel)
You can see a couple of important differences between French and English already.
First, English has no indefinite plural article equivalent to the French des. We say an apple, but for more than one we often just say “apples.” Eg. “You forgot to get apples.” Or you can use the word “some” as a filler, as in “Go and get some nails.”
But in French, it doesn’t exactly mean “some”. It could be a lot, could be few, it just means an indefinite number more than one, and you never miss out the article for an indefinite plural in French.
apples des pommes
Indefinite mass nouns are those sort of things that don’t come in countable units. Things like for example, water, rust, putty, wood, where you don’t count it in separate units. You can have planks of wood, of course, but there it’s the plank that’s being counted in the plural, the substance wood only comes in a singular indefinite quantity.
Some nouns can be either mass or several noun depending on the context
The garden was covered in shadow (mass noun)
The garden was covered in shadows (several noun)
Assuming, just pretend, that you don’t know any more French than that, you wouldn’t be able to make very much out of something like this:
“Le garçon blond descedit les derniers rochers et se dirigea vers la lagune en regardant où il posait les pieds. Il se tenait à la main son tricot de collège qui traînait par terre; sa chemise grise adhérait à sa peau et ses cheveux lui collaient au front. Autour de lui, la profonde déchirure de la jungle formait comme un bain de vapeur.”
Lord of the Flies
It blurs into an indecipherable word soup, shapes that have no grammatic sense for you to find your way around. But see now, when you read the opening of something equally meaningless like Jabberwocky, you have no trouble with it at all:
Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome wraths outgrabe
The reason you can make so much more sense of that is because grammatically it’s written in perfect English. The nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs may not mean very much in themselves, but still you have no trouble at all recognising it as English and applying all the meanings for yourself. It’s also a very clever use of vowel-consonant pattern, and any of those words could easily pass for English. Even more important than all of that, though, the basic grammatical functions are left untouched.
Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe
Twas and the did and in the
You know by main verb, articles and conjunctions that you’re reading English, and so you start to fill in the nouns and adjectives by association, guessing your way through the vocabulary while reading by grammar alone. If on the other hand you were given something like this, you would get nowhere with it.
Hoople brillig gok loshlosh slithy toves preb gyre gork gimble
loshlosh wabe
Pure gibberish. With all the grammatical elements gone, you have no way of keeping track of it now, and your brain doesn’t even try, it just gives up. The fundamental structure of the language is gone. That’s how French, or any foreign language, can seem when it’s completely new and the words don’t have any familiar tone to help you decipher their relation to one another.
So the trick to learning how to read French is in learning these root words first, and it turns out there are not that many of them, so that you can get familiar with its syntax and style and learn to read it as well as you can Jabberwocky, even when you might not be sure of all the vocabulary.
In French just like English, definite and indefinite articles always appear alongside nouns, so try reading this again with the whole thing split up into separate bars like music.
Le garçon / blond descedit / les derniers rochers / et se dirigea vers / la lagune en regardant où / il posait les pieds. / Il se tenait / à la main / son tricot de collège / qui traînait par terre;/ sa chemise grise / adhérait à / sa peau / et ses cheveux lui collaient au front. / Autour de lui, / la profonde déchirure / de la jungle / formait comme / un bain de vapeur.
There is a lot of other stuff in there than just the articles, but you don’t need to worry about any of those yet, we’re going to get to everything. As we get further on you’ll be able to recognise more and more of the grammatical functions and their relations just like you can with English.
Staedtler 