The article
In French, the noun is usually accompanied by an article or another "small word", such as a demonstrative (this, that, ...) or a possessive (my, your, his, ...), etc. To give you an example, we never use the noun "café" (coffee) alone, but we say le café (the coffee), un café (a coffee), du café (some coffee), mon café (my coffee), ce café (this coffee), etc. Only a few categories of nouns, such as people's names, cities and islands, can go without articles (or other small words). Here are a few examples:
people's names: Monsieur Dupont, Paul, Martine, Sophie, Jacques Chirac, etc.
cities: Paris, Lyon, Marseille, New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Pékin, etc.
islands: Taiwan, Haïti, Hawaï, Lantau, Cheung Chau, etc.
So the article is more present in French than in English and even more than in Chinese. As in these two languages however, it is always before the noun.
Another difference is that there are more types of articles in French than in English. There are definite and indefinite articles, as in English (but unfortunately the French articles are not exactly equivalent to the English ones). There is also a third type of articles which has no equivalent in English or Chinese. They are called partitive articles (we use them to give an idea of quantity, but more about this later).
One last important thing you should know about the article is that it bears the marks of the gender (male/female) and number (singular/plural) of the noun. So the same article will actually look and sound differently according to whether it accompanies a male or a female noun, a singular or a plural one. This is totally different from both English and Chinese, where the article does not bear such marks.
Examples:
|
|
masculin |
féminin |
|
singulier |
le
garçon (the boy) |
la
fille (the girl) |
|
pluriel |
les
garçons (the boys) |
les
filles (the girls) |
|
To summarize:
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