Bad news first: The Spanish divide all their nouns in feminine and masculine. Not only that they divide the nouns related to persons (or personalities like my dog - he is really a great guy!), but also chairs and walls and cars and the sky has a gender in the mind of a Spaniard.

The good news anyway is that the rule is quite simple. Words that end with an a are feminine, all others are masculine. It can be that they might end with an o (very often), an e (also quite often) or with an r. But the main rule, if there is no a in the end it cannot be a feminine noun.

With this distinction goes also that there are two (actually three) definite articles with the Spanish nouns. Feminine nouns get the (definite) feminine article la. Masculine nouns get the (definite) masculine article el. It is not that difficult so far, is it? In comparison the English language knows just one definite article the.

Since the basic logic is so clear (of course there are some exceptions, but we will have a look at them a bit later) there is actually no need to search for any other logic. Please keep in mind that in case you have studied French or German, the gender in German or French is NOT automatically the same in Spanish!!

Besides the idea that every single word has a gender (we will come back to this when looking at adjectives) there is not much to say about articles.

Besides that the gender of nouns is quite obvious with the ending of the word we will use the (definite) article in our vocabulary to ease the learning a bit.

As you can see it is pretty easy to form a plural - just add an -s to the noun and use the plural forms of the definite articles:

la -> las
el -> los

for example:

la casa -> las casas
el hombre -> los hombres

If a noun ends on a consonant (consonants are those letters that are not vowels, i.e.: b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k , l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, w, x, y, z) the noun is a masculine noun and the plural is formed by adding -es

As always there is an exception to the rule: there are some words that end with an -o but are nevertheless feminine. Nevertheless, not to worry the number of those is really small.

There is no neutral thing in the Spanish language. Everything is either feminine or masculine. Still there is a neutral article - What for? The neutral article lo forms a noun from an adjective. It is a generalisation like in English combination of the + adjective.

Beside the definite articles there are - as also in English - indefinite articles. In English there is (as also applies to the definite article) only one indefinite article a(n). Spanish has two because there is one needed for the feminine nouns and on for the masculine nouns.

Therefore there is una as indefinite article for feminine nouns and un for masculine ones.

Things get clearer when we play a mind game: A man who crosses the street is a friend of my mother. This sentence means that all men that cross the street are friends of my mother. And even if they had known my mother for 20 years they would not be friends unless they cross the street. In comparison: The man who crosses the street is a friend of my mother. This sentence seems quite clear. There is a man (one certain man) crossing the street, and exactly this man is befriend with my mother.

Actually there are no differences in the logic of using the indefinite articles between the Spanish and English. The only challenge here is to remember that for feminine nouns (the ones with the ending -a) get una. The others get un.

There are also plural forms of indefinite articles unas and unos. They are translated as some and also used the same way the little word some is used in English when meaning an indefinite quantity of something that can be counted. For substances that can not be counted (sand, milk or cream there is another word to be used in Spanish for meaning some. But we will get to this).

Let's have an overview on all the articles! Even though on first glance it seems a bit strange it's not that difficult as you will see:

* Please note the article el should not be mixed with the pronoun él. The pronoun always has an accent.

You can see the difference between the English and Spanish very clear in those examples. English does not change the gender (there is none actually) neither of the definite article nor of the adjective, nor does the number of the adjective change. Therefore, for the English the part of article and adjective stays unchanged. Now Spanish brings the challenge to remember that articles (definite and indefinite) as well as adjectives need to be changed according to the gender and the number of the nouns.