French · Chapter 19 · Lesson 2 · Grammar primer
Noun plurals
Prescribed by the AQA specification - revisited.
The short version
The plural lives in the article, not the noun
The written rule is add -s; the spoken rule is that the -s is silent. Chose and choses sound identical, so the only audible plural marker is the article: le and la against les, un and une against des. Train the ear on that vowel contrast and you stop missing plurals.
les choses
The one plural you can actually hear
Most French plural endings are silent, including the -x on châteaux and jeux. The -al nouns are the exception: journal becomes journaux, animal becomes animaux, cheval becomes chevaux, and the ending genuinely changes on the ear. Nouns already in -s, -x or -z never change at all.
les journaux
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.
Read the full article · 5 min readPractice
Practise this lesson
21-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 2 of 3 in this chapter