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Scraped a 4h Spanish fundamentals YouTube video (transcript + OCR on 14810 frames), extracted structured content across 52 chapters, and generated fill-in-the-blank quizzes for every grammar topic. - 13 new GrammarNote entries (articles, possessives, demonstratives, greetings, poder, al/del, prepositional pronouns, irregular yo, stem-changing, stressed possessives, present/future perfect, present indicative conjugation) - 1010 generated exercises across all 36 grammar notes (new + existing) - Fix tense guide parser to handle unnumbered *Usages* blocks - Rewrite 6 broken tense guide bodies (imperative, subj pluperfect, subj future) with numbered usage format - Bump courseDataVersion 5→6 with TenseGuide refresh on upgrade - Add docs/spanish-fundamentals/ with raw transcripts, polished notes, structured JSON, and exercise data Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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04. Articles
Source: video link
Spanish has definite articles ("the") and indefinite articles ("a / an / some"). Unlike English, both kinds carry gender (masculine / feminine) and number (singular / plural), and they must agree with the noun they precede.
Key Rules
- Most nouns ending in -o are masculine; most ending in -a are feminine.
- Definite article = "the" (specifies); indefinite article = "a/an/some" (generalizes).
- uno before a noun means "one" (the number). To say "a / an" use un (no final o): un libro = a book, uno libro = one book.
- Common exceptions: words ending in -ma of Greek origin (el problema, el programa), plus el día and el agua are masculine despite ending in -a.
- Words ending in -e like clase, carne are feminine: la clase, la carne.
- Words ending in -d (ciudad, universidad) and in -ción (acción, canción) are usually feminine.
- La foto is feminine because it's short for la fotografía.
Definite Articles ("the")
| Masculine | Feminine | |
|---|---|---|
| Singular | el | la |
| Plural | los | las |
Indefinite Articles ("a / an / some")
| Masculine | Feminine | |
|---|---|---|
| Singular | un | una |
| Plural | unos | unas |
Examples
| Spanish | English |
|---|---|
| el libro | the book |
| la piscina | the pool |
| los libros | the books |
| las piscinas | the pools |
| un libro | a book |
| una piscina | a pool |
| unos libros | some books |
| unas piscinas | some pools |
| la clase | the class |
| la carne | the meat |
| la ciudad | the city |
| la universidad | the university |
| la acción | the action |
| el problema | the problem |
| el programa | the program |
| el día | the day |
| el agua | the water |
| la foto (← la fotografía) | the photo |
Notes & Gotchas
- un libro (a book) ≠ uno libro (incorrect — would imply "one book" using a number, and you'd actually say un libro even for "one"; uno stands alone, not in front of a noun).
- El agua uses el not because it's masculine but because of a Spanish euphony rule: feminine singular nouns starting with stressed a- take el in the singular (but plural is las aguas). The video presents these as straightforward exceptions to memorize.
- Always learn the article with the noun — gender is rarely guessable from English.