I have difficulties in understanding how to use the article in some cases

Question

I was trying to practice with some exercices the use of articles in Spanish (el artículo definido) and I don't understand the special cases of "la" transformed into "el". More exactly:

• Cornelio tiene una corbata negra y otra azul; ¿a él le gusta la azul/ or a él le gusta el azul? which one is correct, if any?

and another example, a little bit different:

• En esta ciudad hay parques grandes y pequeños; a nosotros nos gustan los pequeños. Is it correct? or it should be "a nosotros nos gustan las pequeñas", as parque is a feminine noun?

Thank you very much!

adina

Answer 1

Cornelio tiene una corbata negra y otra [corbata] azul; ¿a él le gusta la azul/ or a él le gusta el azul? which one is correct, if any?

From the use of una before corbata we recognize that the word corbata is feminine.

The sentence is talking about a black tie and a blue tie (la otra).

Therefore, in our question the blue one refers to the blue corbata which is la corbata.

¿a él le gusta la azul?

Answer 2

Hello adina

I think "A él le gusta la azul" is correct, because you're referring to a feminine noun.

And "A nosotros nos gustan los pequeños", as the noun used was masculine and plural.

Answer 3

En esta ciudad hay parques grandes y pequeños; a nosotros nos gustan los pequeños.

Notice that it is parques...pequeños. Therefore, unless there is an error in the sentence parque must be masculine. That is why in the second sentence it is los pequeños.

• Well, the confusion only grows: in my dictionary parque is a feminine noun, that's why the exercise seemed wrong to me. On spanishdict.com parque is a masculine, so yes, everything is very clear. Except that now I don't know which dictionary to trust :( - adinacristin Oct 11, 2009

Answer 4

Are there any Spanish adjectives that start with a stressed "a" sound?

Answer 5

I don't think so, but you can start looking in our dictionary by typing "ab" "ac" "ad" "ae" etc in the window.

Answer 6

Odd question. Why do you ask? The word would have to begin with a or ha and would probably be two syllables ending in a vowel to place the accent on the first syllable.

Can we count past participle used as adjectives?

harta

ancho

• I asked because adjectives can be used as nouns and that is the rule for using el instead of la for feminine nouns. - lorenzo9 Oct 10, 2009