Spanish Grammar Basics: Master Articles, Genders & Plurals

Hello, hello, everybody. My name is Rob. I'm with ConnectionBilingue.com. I really hope that you are enjoying what you're finding here on Udemy. Go ahead and dive into any of our lessons. I'm going to try to upload some every once in a while to go ahead and keep everything diversified for you. You can continue to offer good, relatable, new content. My teaching structure, I've spent about 14 years learning Spanish, and it's been a doozy sometimes. But what I'm here to do is to go ahead and give you a boost in your learning. Rather than spending so many times learning articles, so much time learning articles and now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to pepper in a lot of different things in bite-sized lessons for you so that you get that boost. I don't want you to spend so much time learning one particular thing. No, we're going to do about four or five things all at once, and then we're going to go ahead and put those in too. Practice and then we're going to keep on doing that over and over again so that you have the basis of Spanish that you need to really strategize and maximize your learning opportunity. So I hope that you're enjoying it. Visit me on ConnectionBilingue.com and but also feel free to dive into some of these Udemy courses. I'm developing them just for you. So if you have any thoughts, questions, concerns, good jokes or anything, I'm very easy to find. Just Google my name and send me a message. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Hello everybody, my name is Rob. I'm with ConnectionBilingue.com. Today we're going to be diving into definite and indefinite articles. Also, we're going to be looking at how to be making nouns plural. Furthermore, along with that, we're going to be covering which nouns are going to be masculine, which nouns are going to be feminine, why, when, how, where, all of that. So go ahead and jump into your vocabulary. Once you finish with your vocabulary, we'll see you in class. Hello, hello, and welcome back. I hope that that vocabulary went well for you. If you have any complaints. Thanks. You'll have a place where you can put that in if it didn't work out well for you. I need to know if it does not. So we're going to go ahead and dive into our lesson today where we're going to be looking at what are articles, whether they're definite articles or indefinite articles. What are they in Spanish? In Spanish, we're going to cover how there are gender, masculine and feminine nouns. Another thing that we're going to cover in today's lesson is how to make nouns. Become plural. So here's a couple things that we need to always remember whenever we're studying Spanish is that everything agrees in number, gender, time, and person. I'm only going to cover these two right here today, number and gender. This is mainly whenever things are going to be singular or plural. Do I have one cup of coffee or do I have many cups of coffee? Just one or more And the number is going to really kick in whenever we're talking about nouns and adjectives. And today we're just mainly going to be focusing on nouns. Furthermore, we're going to be talking about gender, how there is masculine, there are masculine and feminine nouns whenever it comes to Spanish. And these are like, once again, we're mainly going to be focusing on nouns and adjectives, just like you can see here. So let's go ahead and dive into what are called the definite and indefinite articles. This is going to be the very first lesson I always recommend anybody to cover in Spanish because it clarifies a lot and it really sets the tone. So what are... What is a definite article? The first step in learning a language is going to be learning your own language. So what is a definite article in English? I have the pen. Can you hand me the pen that's over there? The pen. Which one? I'm talking about a specific, specific pen. It is definite. It is defined. It is specific. The definite article is the word In Spanish, there are four different ways to say the word the, whether it is going to be singular or plural. Masculine or feminine. These are going to be el, la, los, las. El, la, los, las. El, la, los, las. I really hope that you were saying them with me because that's really going to help your pronunciation. El, la, los, las. Sometimes in English we want to be lazy with our vowels. We We always have to pronounce the vowels, los. Las, because sometimes we try to, we get lazy and these get mixed up. Los, las. So now let's talk about indefinite articles. Well, you know, this is the pen, but what if I just need a pen? I just need, I don't care what pen, I just need a pen. Can someone bring me a pen? I'm not being specific. I just need a pen, okay? I need a cup of coffee. I don't have my own cup of coffee quite yet. I'm not defining which. I just need a cup of coffee, a cup of coffee. A and an are the same thing. In English, we change it based on the vowel sound. But a and an are going to follow the same rules. Now, what's interesting is you see this word some. What is the plural form of a and an? I always love asking this question to people, and they're like, I don't even know. It's my favorite moment. The plural of a and an is going to be the word some. So let's go ahead and look at this in Spanish. Well, how do I say a and an in Spanish? Un or una. Now to say some in Spanish is going to be the word, the plural version, unos and unas. So let's go ahead and say these together. Un, una, unos, unas. Un, una, unos, unas. It's very important, like I said before, it's very important to pronounce those vowels unos and unas. Now, note the difference between the definite and indefinite. Sorry, note the difference, goodness gracious, note the difference in the definite and indefinite articles being specific versus general, and we did cover that, how the definite article is definite. It is... It is concrete. I am specific about what I want. Indefinite. I just want some pens. Can someone bring me some pens? Can someone bring me some coffee? I don't care which one. It's not specific. It's very general whenever it comes to the indefinite article. Now, let's talk about the different genders that we have in Spanish nouns. Masculine nouns generally end with an O. A B-R-E, an A-J-E, or an A-N. Oh, man. Massive majority of your nouns are going to end with O if they're masculine. There are a few exceptions which we will cover, but for the more... I hear people all the time, whenever they're trying to make up Spanish words, they're like, put this in the sink-O, and you're like, okay. And it's kind of funny but you know it's not far from being wrong. So here's a couple examples. This is the word year. Oh you studied this in your vocabulary. Año, zapato, hombre, personaje, y volcán. This word means and. That's volcano. Feminine nouns generally end with the letter A I-O-N or A-D. And add, cocina maleta. It's very important. I really hope that whenever you're covering your vocabularies, be sure to pronounce your words. Say it out loud. There's a part on SpanishDictionary.com where you can, rather than typing your vocabulary, you can change it into speech. It drives me insane because it's very particular, but it is very helpful whenever you're trying to to really nail down your pronunciation. So now... Rules are meant to be broken, so here are your popular exceptions whenever it comes to words that end with O, but they're feminine. La mano. El foto. Now the thing is, this is kind of cheating, this is a sneaky one, because it's not el foto, it's la foto. And the thing about it is the word is not really foto, it's fotografía. And so, it's a shortened and condensed word. Where it's supposed to go. Fotografía ends with an A. It follows the rule. It's just a condensed version. La foto. El día. El día. El agua. There's arguments about it going el agua, la agua, depending on how you're using it to advance for this lesson. We'll cover it later. La moto. The motorcycle. La moto. And so, and it's probably because it's la motocicleta but anyways google it. How to make a noun plural. Now this is going to be fun because in English we have all these rules. If it's double s is you know we're not going to do any of that we're just going to go straight forward and let it be basic. Nouns ending in a vowel we simply add an s. Nouns ending in a consonant we add an ES and if it's a noun that ends with the letter Z We change the Z to an S. I mean, sorry, we change the Z to a CES E-E-S. Very straightforward. Here's an example right here. We're gonna cover Okay, perfect. I was really I was really scared. It's gonna mess up my format. Okay, so now we're el niño el niño the boy el Niño ends with an O. It's masculine. It is singular Now, and this is the definite article. Now, let's change it over to an indefinite article, where it's going to just be a boy. It's not as particular. It's a boy. Un niño. Un niño. Note the difference. El niño, it's very specific. Un niño, it's very, very generalized. Now, what if there's more than one? Los niños. Los niños. The boys. Los niños. It still means the. We only have one way to say the. It doesn't matter if it's singular or plural. We don't have masculine or feminine nouns. So, we just have the one. So, it can be a little bit of a shift for you to think that there's four different ways to say the word the. So, los... Niños, los niños, the boys. Now let's change it over to be nonspecific. Unos niños, some boys, unos niños. Over here, let's change it over to be feminine. La niña, la niña, la niña, the girl, la niña, the girl. Now, if it's just, once again, nonspecific, una niña, a girl. We're going to continue. Las niñas, the girls, they're plural, they're multiple. Let's go up and they're specific. The girls, the girls. Now just some girls. Girls, unas niñas, unas niñas. Very important once again to pronounce the o's, pronounce the a's. Las niñas, los niños. Las niñas, los niños. Completely changes the meaning because, like I said, in English we can be a little lazy with our vowels because sometimes it is that way. But here it is very, very, very, very important for us to make sure that we're pronouncing all of the vowels correctly. And the cool thing about it is that all of the vowels are always going to make the same sound. All the time, so we don't have to worry about, well, if it ends with an E, is it a long a? No, it is what it is. El niño, un niño, los niños, unos niños, la niña, una niña, las niñas, unas niñas. All right, so now let's go down here. This is going to be a part of your study guide where you're going to go ahead and change over a couple of the words to be plural, and let's go through some of this. You know what? Let's do it on the next video. See you there. All right, welcome back. We're going to talk about the words actor, character, city, day, friendship. So let's go ahead and take a look at this because here you're going to have some homework at the end of this that you are more than welcome to do. I don't care because the real homework is life and you can go ahead and get a head start with it here or don't. So actor, el actor, el actor, el actor. What does this mean? I hope you said the actor. Now, we're going to go ahead and change it to plural. Now, what we do, this ends with a vowel or a consonant. This is a consonant. A, E, I, O, U are your vowels, and everything else is going to be a consonant. Los actor and the, what was the rule up here? Nouns ending in a vowel add S. Nouns ending in a consonant add ES. So, what are we going to do? Put that picture back where it was and then we're going to come down here and we're going to add an es. El actor. Los actores. Los actores. Sometimes we want to say actors. Actores. No. Los actores. Los actores. Now let's make it indefinite. Un actor and unos actores. Excellent, excellent. So now let's go with character. This is the word of Personaje. El Personaje. El Personaje. Now let's make it plural. Los Personajes. Okay notice what is this ending? What is that? Is that a consonant? Is that a vowel? It's a vowel. A-E-I-O-U. So what do we do? We just simply add an S and we make it plural. Let's make it indefinite. Un personaje, unos personajes. What does this mean? Tell me what it means. Say it out loud because I can't hear you. Un personaje is a character. Unos personajes, some characters. Now it is important for us to go ahead and continue to remind ourselves. This is the word some, some actors. Let's go to city. See what it did there? City. La ciudad. La ciudad. An important note here is the letter D. We're going to need to soften it up a little bit. It's not la ciudad. No, it's going to be ciudad. We kind of want to almost bite our tongue a little bit and do like a vvv. It's kind of a TH sound, but we're going to mix in a little bit of a D sound. So it's going to be la ciudad. La ciudad. See, you heard that little bit of a d on there? La ciudad, ciudad, la ciudad. And then what if it's multiple cities? Las ciudades, las ciudades, las ciudades. What if it's a city in some cities? Una ciudad, unas ciudades. Ciudades. Notice I'm not saying Ciudades. Ciudades. No, no, no, no. It's too sharp of a D. Thank Unos Ciudades. Uno, unas. Oh, goodness gracious. Unas Ciudades. Unas Ciudades de el día. We're going to see this a lot with like buenos días. Buenos días. Why do we say buenos días? you. Buenos días is because it is a masculine, masculine noun. Día, el día, los días. And once again, you're hearing that D. It's not días, días. No, too sharp of a D. Yes, indeed. El día, el día, los días, los días. Un día, unos días. Unos días. Buenos días, buenos días. Good morning. Buenos días. Buenos días y bienvenidos. Sorry, I hear a lot of Mexican radios. Hello and welcome, we have two types of music. We have two types of music and y'all gotta message me on Facebook about that story. Okay, so friendship. La amistad. Las amistades. Amistades. Una amistad. Unas amistades. Okay, here's an exception. La mano, la mano, la mano, la mano, la mano, la mano. Las manos. Una mano. Unas manos. Now, I'm going to go ahead and let y'all finish some of this. I'm going to read through it really quickly, and you can read along with me. Thank you. Good, thank you. Thank you. Hospital. H. Get rid of that H. We don't pronounce the H. H is silent. Thank you, everybody. El hospital. El hospital. Los hospitales. Un hospital, unos hospitales. Kitchen, cocina, las cocinas. What are we doing? We're just adding the S. Oh, let's go back to hospital. It ends with a consonant. So what do we do? We add an ES. We add that ES right there. Okay, hombre. What does hombre end in? In an E. Well, do we add an extra E? No. Los hombres, los hombres. El hombre, los hombres. Un hombre, unos hombres. La moto. Las motos. It ends with a vowel. Una moto. Unas motos. It feels weird because it doesn't have that continuity of una moto. No, it's una moto. La película. La película. Las películas. Una película. Unas películas. El lápiz. Okay, here's a big one. This is a big one. Attention, attention. Pencil. It ends with a Z. What do we do? We simply knock the Z out, put a C, and add an ES. Las. Sorry, not las. El lápiz. Los lápices. Lápices. It pretty much would make the same, I mean, just think about it. We're just making the plural sound, and that doesn't look like it's spelled correctly because it's not. Las lapices. We're just creating a phonetical flow whenever it comes to being able to pronounce it well. Los lápices. Un lápiz. Unos lápices. Once again, photo. This is not a... You know, some people say, well, it's la foto, so it's an exception, but we're just cutting the word in half. It's la fotografía. So, la foto, las fotos, una foto, unas fotos, el piano, los pianos, un piano, unos pianos. And then let me see, here's another one down here. We're going to jump down here to the song, la canción, la canción, la canción, las canciones. Okay, well, it ends with a consonant, so what do we do? We add an ES. Maletas, maleta. Oh my gosh, it ends with a consonant! What do we do? We add an es. Volcán, volcán, unos volcanes. Okay, so el agua, las aguas. What's going on? If it's plural, it becomes feminine. I don't make the rules. Fight with somebody else on it. Um, el año, los años, un año, unos años. It's very important that ñ, it's called an ñ, it's like you're, uh, you gotta, I always say like, it's like you're chopping the air. Ya, ya, los años. Ya, ñ, los años. Okay, so this is going to be some of your homework. You can print this out. It's going to be part of your lesson where you have access to this. And I highly recommend that you go through this. Double check yourself. Use the examples above. I'm going to give, you're going to have all of this to be able to print out. Go ahead and go through here and fill this out. Suitcase. Go through here. Circle la maleta, una maleta. Circle the one that's correct. Then make them plural. Do word exercises on this. Have fun with it because the more that you write things out, oh, I'm going to have to write it out. Yes, do it. Because the more you write it out, the more you're putting it in your brain and the more that you're going to learn it. So go ahead and do it, knock it out. And I think that is going to be all for today. Thank you so much for joining. If there's anything you need, feel free to message me. I'm very easy to get a hold of and I always have my phone very close to me. So thanks for watching. Thank you so much for joining today. I hope that you enjoyed it. Please review the class. You can follow me on all of my social media networks. You're always more than welcome to join my free Duolingo class. It is completely free. What you do is you can These are the instructions to join. I'm going to go ahead and include this PDF below and some of the files so that you're able to join it. You can join through your smartphone or tablet. You can click this link on there or you can go down to your to your profile options. Click on options. Click Duolingo for schools and add the code XFZNJZ. And, yeah, you're more than welcome to join at any time. It doesn't really show you any of your information, what you're studying or anything like that, but it does allow me to give you periodic challenge to kick you into higher gear. So I hope that you enjoyed today. Please leave a review, join my Duolingo class, and I'll look forward to seeing you on future videos. Thank you. Hello and thank you so much for completing the course here. And I'm very, very honored that you took the time to do so. So we're gonna take just a little bit of time to look at the different resources that are available to you. So right now, the first one that I really wanna go ahead and invite you to is right here. This is our Connection Bilingue free Spanish community. There are no sales allowed here. Please don't post that you're selling your cookies or, you know, cool cat pictures or whatever. On here, we have a couple things just, you know, that we post every now and then. We talk about landscapes here. This one, I think this is a picture that we showed here in the class today. But what we also do is we have some como se dice dog in español. How do you say dog in Spanish? And we it's a fun little environment where you can come in here. How do you say the beach? You know it has a couple pictures there. Some people introduce themselves. How high can you count in Spanish? And people give a go. So go ahead and feel free to join us here at the Free Spanish Community. Once again, no sales allowed, just a fun little place where we can go through. Here's another one. I thought that was a bridge, the word puente. In Mexico, it means a long weekend. And there was an example, it was the day of the Constitution. Día de la Constitución. And so they were celebrating. So different things that are really relevant. Let me see if I can. Provecho. This is a thing where somebody, if they walk by your table and you're eating, it's just polite for someone to say provecho or buen provecho. Phrase said before or during a meal to wish someone an enjoyable meal. Like, bon appetit. So, just a couple different cultural insights. People can introduce themselves. This is somebody who wanted to upload a picture of their Pedro. So, that's fun. It's fun. Different people, wherever they visited. Sometimes we'll do some conjugation stuff here. Verbs with, nerds with verbs. So, there's just a couple options for you. Feel free to join us here at the Free Spanish Community. There's a link in that article that has some of this. But also, I do want to, and don't worry about the payments part, don't send me anything like that. The main thing that I want you to focus in here is contacting me. Text me, call me. If you spam me, I'm going to ignore you. That's just how life works. I have WhatsApp. There's my phone number right there. You can feel free to email me. You can follow me on Instagram, Facebook, my About Me. Let's go ahead and take a look at this. This is a little bit of my resume here where you can see my Hispanic cultural development, Where you can see that where I started my... Spanish learning journey in Capilano Community College back in 2010, I did two years, I did two semesters, and honestly, guys, sorry, I may be throwing somebody under the bus here, but I didn't even learn how to speak in the past tense, I was in Spanish, I was learning Spanish for over a year, and still never learned how to speak in the past tense, so that is a big, that's a big motivator for me, where I've kind of, if you continue path with me we're going to be speaking in the past tense pretty quickly just because I want us to actually conquer some things here whenever we're learning Spanish. I took my first trip to Mexico in 2012, Lima, Iquitos, Peru in 2013, Honduras in 2013. I moved to Oaxaca, Mexico where I attended the Roca Blanca Spanish School and you can see over here on the little line on the timelines here the the green part is going to be my Cultural development. And I got plenty of it over here. I love this picture. This is probably one of my favorite pictures. Cheers. But honestly, this is just a picture of my resume that's on here. You're more than welcome to do it. Right here, I did get my, oh, wrong one. In May of 2019, I did become a certified Duolingo instructor. So that's fun. And I think down here I have, yep, I have my certificate down here. So, I'm here. But this right here is just a general assessment of who I am, what I do. I own my business called MissBlueAdvantage.com. There's the About Me if you want to do that. And my website here is Connection Bilingue that you're more than welcome to check out. There's going to be some development that's going to be coming on here. So let me know if whenever you see this video, if it looks a little different, please hit me up and let me know. You can do some Learn Spanish here. But I'm not here to promote my business. I just want you to enjoy the Udemy stuff. But I think it is cool just to know what your teacher does, who they are. You're more than welcome to contact me, to reach out to me. Don't send me money. Just do whatever you want to do to me. But I do want you to feel like you are welcome to join the free Spanish community. It is very important, you know, just to find other people that are wanting to jump in the journey with you. So that's fun right there. Last but certainly not least, always, always feel free to join. So let us begin with a tour of Spanish dictionary. Okay, so this is SpanishDictionary.com. This is a plethora of resources. There's also 1 million ads, so that's something to look out for. But I used this. Constantly, this is on the home page of my phone. It is on, you can see I have a little bookmarker up here where it is so much stuff. They have the Learn Spanish. Now this right here is kind of like the journey like they have on Duolingo. Sorry, don't tell them I said this, but I do not love how this does. This goes because as you'll see whenever here. Good to see you. You can do it, of course. I mean, some exposure is better than no exposure. I just am picky. So this is basic introductions here. Me llamo Gloria. Okay, me llamo Gloria. So this is, you're learning phrasing, which is cool. My name is Gloria. Hola. Hola, you choose what you're hearing. ¿Cómo te llamas? But I think that... You can figure it out this way. I just like the ability of learning how do you form questions. What is te llamas? This is already a reflexive verb. This is pretty advanced stuff. I mean, maybe you need to learn it pretty quickly. Go for it. Some exposure is better than no exposure, but I do like building a foundation where you can build up. See, why do you say me llamo Gloria? Well, I call myself Gloria. Me llamo Gloria. Cool. I'm just complaining. What is your name? So that's just a brief little example here. Mucho gusto. Nice to meet you. That's just a regular vocabulary word. Como te llamas? Como te llamas? Okay, so there's enough of that. Okay, so this is more of a journey along that you can do. Feel free to do it. I'm not, you know, your journey is your journey. You can do some translation exercises over here, where you type in all sorts of things here, popular Spanish lessons, if you really want to focus in on some of those things. And there's modules. They're very helpful. A lot of times, whenever I'm doing tutoring, I usually will go over the lesson. I'll explain it. We'll have a conversation about it. Really dive in through the lesson so that whenever you do these grammar, and then I will assign grammar lessons from here as homework to solidify the different things. Because I do think that some of the lessons go a little bit more. Thank They dive in too fast, and so that's where I think that I can come in and help move things over a little bit. Conjugations, let's look at a verb to let's apart, separate, set aside. So what's really cool about this is you can look at your verb conjugations, you. maybe a little bit too advanced for you right now, but that's okay. So, this is all the different forms that this verb can be. It's a very, very, very important tool. Whenever you start trying to diversify your Spanish vocabulary, you can go through the source here. You can find a couple examples. I don't like how the examples, for example, you're only going to find apartar. Apartar? Very, very, very. I mean, you're not, but you're not going to find, let's say, for example, yo aparto. I do this here. At this point, then I would get how that verb is used. And I wish it would diversify that a little bit. But anyways, this is SpanishDictionary.com. The main tab that I want you to focus on right now is this vocabulary tab. This right here, I have a ton of lists. I'm learning words. Every single day I come here and I start quiz all words. And it'll throw me some random words here. And that's today I'm on the 38-day streak, which I had. Oh, my gosh. I had like. I think it was like 114 days or something like that, and I just completely forgot to do that. Um, but yeah, there's some featured lists. Go find a few, knock them out. You can create your own list. One thing that I do every once in a while is I will watch a movie or read a book and I will do what's called like word mining. And I'm trying to find words. I don't know. I don't know how this is used. I don't. So I'll go ahead and do that. And I'll create my list. See, this is my Rob's randoms. That is, that's my movie mining list. So, um. I have a student that needed some religious words. Every once in a while, I do songs. If you're interested in those songs, send me a message. You saw my contact information in the last video. So feel free to message me if you want specialized lists. I do that also. So I have a couple friends that they needed some legal words or construction words. That was a really recent one. So I created a list for construction words and sent them right over to them, and they didn't have to worry about all that. But go through some of these, learn some words. Um, I've... You can see some of these that I've been working on here with the intermediate and advanced words. go ahead and jump into this and start your quiz with your bigger your beginner words you don't have to finish it you can see how my progress here on so many of these are are not fully all the way through but that doesn't matter what matters is that i'm learning new things constantly and that's what i would like to go ahead and show you that going through the spanish dictionary.com class you have all sorts of of resources here. They are free. Of course, you can see they're going to try to get you to upgrade. Upgrade if you want. I'm not going to. I don't get anything from it. But I do want you to know that this is such a strong resource that you have so many options here. So tinker around, get in there, learn some new things, and send me a message. Tell me how it's going. So anyways, thank you so much for being part of this, and I'll see you in the next video. We'll be right back.