Forum Rocket Spanish Spanish - Grammar Definite articles for a language

Definite articles for a language

Sandy-B12

Sandy-B12

In Chapter 1 Grammar you say "the short defining word before the noun is really part of the noun," but one says, "Je ne parle pas anglais (or francais)."  Why is there no definite article (one assumes it would be masculine)?
Dan-H24

Dan-H24

Is this supposed to be in Rocket Spanish?
Robert-C7

Robert-C7

Yes, it looks like it should have been asked in Rocket French Grammar.  I guess she had Spanish on her mind when she asked this question.
Steven-W15

Steven-W15

When to use articles and when not to has always seemed to give me some trouble - regardless of the language.
 
Dan-H24

Dan-H24

I feel like I am slowly developing an intuition of when articles should be used in Spanish. I am not always correct, but getting better as I go along. Sort of like the intuition of when to use por o para.
Sandy-B12

Sandy-B12

Sorry, I meant in French.  "Je parle anglais" not "Je parle l'anglais."  Why do language nouns not have masculine and feminine definite articles when said articles are supposedly an intrinsic part of all nouns?
Steven-W15

Steven-W15

J’avais bien pigé la question. Comme les autres l’ont dit pourtant, il vaut mieux poster cette question dans le forum français. Ta phrase est correcte bien que je sois incapable de te dire pourquoi on n’utilise pas l’article dans ce contexte. Ceci dit, ça n’a rien à voir avec le fait que c’est une langue. Voir la phrase suivante :
- Le français est plus difficile que l’espagnol.
Sandy-B12

Sandy-B12

Stephen,  merci pour ton response.  Je ne veux pas lutter contra le keyboard donc il n'y a de pas caractere speciale.

Il faut que je dit que ma question est pour le francais premier?


 
Steven-W15

Steven-W15

Bonjour Sandy. Mon clavier est configuré pour le français (AZERTY). Ceci est facile à faire via le système d'exploitation. Autrement il faut suivre le conseil de Dan H24 dont le voici :

I changed my keyboard to US International-PC. Now I can type
accented vowels by first pressing ' then the vowel. The tilde is
made by holding down the option key and typing n. Leading
exclamation points: option+!. ¿: Hold option+shift and type ?. The
only problem it causes when typing English is if you mean to type a
word with an apostrophe that is immediately followed by a vowel it
will think you want to accent the letter. You just have to remember
to hit space first in this unusual circumstance. After have done
this for a long time I can type accented characters pretty quickly.
 

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