spanishlanguagehelp.com - Definite and Indefinite Articles tutorial

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Articles are words used with nouns (sustantivos) to limit or give definiteness to them. In Spanish, just like in English (a, an, the), an article goes before a noun. However, in Spanish the article will agree with the noun in number and gender.

What the heck? How can nouns have gender? Let us explain...

Romans spoke Latin, which today is only spoken by Catholic priests and people trying to score higher on standardized tests. The Roman Empire covered large tracts of Europe, and in the lands closest to Rome, the Latin language became the norm. Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Catalán, Rumanian, and French essentially are what Latin evolved into after the fall of the Roman Empire. Spain suffered invasions by Visigoth barbarians who decided to stay, and beginning in 711 A.D., Moorish Arabs invaded Spain and pushed north until the French King Charles Martel stopped them from conquering all of Europe. The Moors ruled the Iberian Peninsula, which the Iberians constantly fought to reclaim, until 1492 when the last Moors were kicked out of the city of Granada. Both Latin and Arabic left their mark on modern Spanish, because their use of articles evolved into the gendered usages of today. If a noun is masculine or feminine does not depend on society’s perception of the thing as possessing the traits that culture assigns to gender stereotypes; the gender of articles is merely a legacy of mostly Latin and some Arabic syntax.

Definite Articles:		Indefinite Articles:
el la		un una
los las		unos unas

Think of articles like this: definite articles point out a specific type of item--for example:

I have seen the movie.	VS.	I have seen a movie.
I am singing the song	VS.	I am singing a song.

Indefinite articles refer to any item. If I have seen the movie, then it’s assumed that we both know which movie I’m talking about--it’s a definite movie. If I have seen a movie, it could be any movie, not a specific kind--thus indefinite. See where I’m going with this?

In Spanish, the articles must agree with the noun in both number and gender, for example:

I have seen the movie. Yo he visto la película	VS.	I have seen a movie. Yo he visto una película.
I have seen the horses. Yo he visto los caballos.	VS.	I have seen some horses. Yo he visto unos caballos.

In this case, because "movie" is feminine, we use the articles "la" and "una." In the second set, we use "los" and "unos" because horses is masculine and plural. It should be noted that "unos" and "unas" are not used very frequently as there are other words that mean "some." If you still don’t get it, re-read the whole page again. If you are reading this sentence for the second time with no improvement, email one of us, and if we have time, we’ll try and give you some pointers.