French · Chapter 1 · Lesson 12 · Grammar primer
Articles
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
The article English drops but French demands
French has a third article system English lacks: the partitive du, de la, de l', des, marking an unspecified amount. Je mange du pain is I eat bread. Je mange pain is not a sentence. When in doubt, put the article in; French over-articulates by English standards.
Je mange du pain.
Talking about dogs in general takes les
General statements about a whole class keep the definite article in French, even though English strips it out. J'aime les chiens is I like dogs, not some particular dogs. The same goes for abstract nouns, languages and countries: la patience est une vertu, j'aime le français, je visite la France.
J'aime les chiens.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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29-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end.
Lesson 12 of 13 in this chapter