Spanish · Chapter 2 · Lesson 3 · Grammar primer
Articles
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
When in doubt, keep the Spanish article
Spanish uses an article in five places English drops it: general statements about a class, abstract nouns, days of the week, languages after most verbs, and body parts. Me gustan los perros is I like dogs, not the dogs. You will be wrong less often by over-articulating than by under-articulating.
Me gustan los perros.
Where Spanish drops the article and English keeps it
After ser plus a profession, nationality or religion with no adjective, Spanish leaves the article out: es médico. The profession is behaving more like an adjective than a noun. Add a modifier and the article comes straight back: es un médico excelente.
Es médico.
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 · 3 min readPractice
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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 3 of 13 in this chapter