Italian grammar

Articles

In English you already use articles: “the table”, “a coffee”. Good news — Italian has them too. The twist is that an Italian article also tells you the noun’s GENDER (masculine/feminine) and NUMBER, and its shape changes with the first letter of the next word: il, lo, la, l’, un, una, del… On this card you’ll see what each one is for and how to pick the right one. Golden rule from day one: always learn a noun TOGETHER with its article (not “libro”, but “il libro”).

Italian grammar

Level: A1 · 18 min of study

In una casa: «Questa è la cucina. C’è un tavolo, una sedia e il frigorifero. Vuoi un caffè o del tè?» Hai notato quelle paroline davanti ai nomi — il, la, un, una, del? Sono gli articoli.

Che cos’è un articolo?

Look at the examples and notice the words in BOLD. An article is a short word that goes BEFORE a noun and carries two pieces of information: (1) whether we mean something known/specific (definite article: il, la — like English “the”) or something new/non-specific (indefinite article: un, una — like English “a/an”); (2) the gender and number of the noun. English does the first part too, but NOT the second — “the” and “a” never change for gender. Try to work it out: why is it “il” once and “la” another time? We’ll confirm it in the next sections — it depends on the noun’s gender (masculine/feminine).

  • **il** libro the book — specific, known
  • **un** libro a book — one of many
  • **la** casa the house / home
  • **del** pane some bread

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