Why El Agua but not La Agua ?

Question

La must be use before the nouns which are feminine or which ends in -a but in lesson 1.3 it says El Agua. What is the reason ?

There are quite a few former threads on this subject if you want more info. Just type in "el agua" in the search box under the green 'ask a question' box and you'll get more help from former threads. - katydew, Jun 3, 2013

Answer 1

There are a few of these that don't follow the normal pattern. Why? Spanish doesn't like to put the same sounding letters next to each other and even though it's a 'la' word, you just have to accept that sometimes these exceptions have to be memorized.

I'm sure there's a more technical explanation, but just knowing that some nouns just don't follow the pattern will help to know the ones that must just be memorized until they sound 'right'.

Under the Spanish grammar section of this site (learn -> Spanish grammar -> articles), you'll find out more about this. Just keep clicking links. You can even do practice quizzes to get them memorized.:

articles and their exceptions

Answer 2

"La must be use before the nouns which ends in -a" FALSE. There are loads of exceptions: el sofá, el idioma, el tema, el problema...

It's different when it STARTS with an a. If you say "la agua", "la hacha" o "la águila" sounds like one word "lagua, lacha, láguila" that's why you have to change the article. So it's "el agua, el hacha, el águila"

However they still "ok" in the plural and you say "las aguas, las hachas, las águilas"

Answer 3

To add some info I could say the difference between:
El agua and La alcantarilla is that the first a in agua is stressed and because of this you must use El agua when singular but Las aguas when plural.