Your Guide to Understanding Definite Articles in Italian
How to say “the” in Italian
ITALIAN FROM SCRATCH #7
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What Are Definite Articles?
In any language, when you hear the phrase “Definite articles,” you should automatically understand that the speaker is talking about a specific thing.
When the speaker uses a definite article, they want to speak about a DEFINITE thing or indicate specific nouns in a sentence.
This is the gist of any definite article post or video; just keep that in mind while you are reading or watching and you won't get lost.
Forms of Italian Definite Articles
In Italian, there is no universal word for “the.” There are many forms of “the” and to use the correct one, you need to know the gender and number of the thing you want to talk about.
This is a bit confusing for English speakers because in English, words do not have a gender. However, in many languages, such as Italian, Spanish, German, Arabic, and a lot more, there is a distinction between masculine and feminine words.
In Italian, definite articles agree in gender (masculine/feminine) and number (singular/plural) with the noun they modify.
There are seven different forms of definite articles in Italian:
1- Il (singular masculine)
- This is used before singular masculine nouns starting with a consonant except for those requiring “lo.”
2- Lo (singular masculine before words starting with s + consonant, z, gn, pn, ps, x)
- Lo is used before singular masculine nouns starting with s + consonant, z, gn, pn, x, or ps.
3- La (singular feminine)
- This is used before singular feminine nouns.
4- L’ (singular)
- This is used before singular nouns starting with a vowel or a silent H.
5- I (plural masculine)
- Used before plural masculine nouns.
6- Gli (plural masculine)
- Think about this as the plural of (Lo) that we just explained and so it is used before masculine plural nouns that begin with “s” followed by a consonant, “z”, “gn”, “ps”, “x” or a vowel.
7- Le (plural feminine)
- Used before plural feminine nouns.
To recap
Here is a recap of what we learned today:
I hope you guys enjoyed it and stay tuned for future lessons. Alla prossima, ciao ciao!
