The French Indefinite Articles: Un – Une – Des are, just like in English, used in a lot of sentences. Which means that you have to master them even as a beginner. The good thing is that they are not very hard to use and follow a few regular and easy rules of French grammar.
To know when to use them properly, you need to know if the following noun is feminine or masculine. Check this rule here for the gender of nouns.
We use indefinite articles to talk about unspecified things or people.
Here is the table for the French indefinite articles UN UNE DES:
UN + masculine noun a / an
UNE + feminine noun a / an
DES + plural noun, masculine or feminine Some
Pronunciation of UN – UNE – DES
The French Indefinite Article UN
Like said at the beginning, UN is always used for masculine nouns. The pronunciation will slightly change if the noun starts with a consonant or a vowel, as well is the noun starts with a H muet or a H aspiré.
A few examples when the noun starts with a consonant:
A few examples when the noun starts with an H aspiré (acting as a consonant):
Because H acts as a consonant, we don’t add a LIAISON between the article and the noun.
Now when the noun starts with a vowel or a H muet (acting as a vowel):
In this case, you can add a LIAISON between the article and the noun with an N sound. Here they are noted in red.
If you learn better with a video lesson, you can watch this lesson about The French Indefinite Articles: Un Une Des, on my Youtube channel.
The French indefinite article UNE is easier to pronounce than UN because its pronunciation never changes. We always pronounce the letters separately U followed by N, but we don’t pronounced the final E.
The only thing to remember before using UNE in French is that it’s only used with a feminine noun.
A few French nouns with UNE:
The French indefinite article DES is use with plural nouns. Just like UN, it also changes pronunciation depending if the following noun starts with a vowel or a consonant, or a H muet or H aspiré. The rule is exactly the same with UN and DES.
The good news is that no matter if the noun is feminine or masculine, we will use DES. No need to know the gender to use the plural French indefinite articles. Lucky!
A few examples when the noun starts with a consonant:
A few examples when the noun starts with a H aspiré (acting as a consonant):
Because H acts as a consonant, we don’t add a LIAISON between the article and the noun.
Now when the noun starts with a vowel or a H muet (acting as a vowel):
In this case, you can add a LIAISON between the article and the noun with a Z sound. Here they are noted in red.
The French article UN in sentences:
The French article UNE in sentences:
The French article DES in sentences:
18 Responses
The best wonderful grammar
Thank you this is very easy pickup and learning thank you lot
Thank you so much Vivek ☺️
Thank you soo much madam.can you please give this explanation in french too in writing, that will be of great help.
Lina unfortunately my lessons are all made in English 🙂
Pls help me in this
Change the article using Le, la Les, l’
1. Un gombo……
2. Une mangue….
3. Un Ami….
4. Des biscuits….
5. Une orange…
Is that your homework Alfred?
This is good
Merci 🙂
I had a question that how to figure out if word is masculine or feminine by looking at the word?
Most of the time, nouns ending with E are feminine 🙂
Ok what about Une Pizza
Une pizza – Des pizzas. Is that what you were asking for?
I want to learn french
You are in the right spot 🙂
How to figure if a word is masculine
You have to know the gender of each word. Always study vocabulary with an article to know the gender 🙂
I also want to learn French