Nouns; A person, place or thing.

In French, there are a few basic nouns you need to know.

Je - I
Tu - You
Il - He
Elle - She
Nous - We
Vous - You (plural or formal)
Ils - They (male / mixed)
Elles - They (all female)

With objects, you would use either il or elle (or ils or elles if there are multiple), as in French all nouns are either feminine or masculine. This goes for places as well.

How do you know if an object is masculine or feminine? As far as I know, there is no way of determining that besides looking it up in a dictionary. Wordreference is very handy for this.

Let's take the word chair.

It tells us that the word for a chair is "chaise", or you can also use the less common word "fauteil".

If we look right next to the word chaise, it says nf.

Nf  means 'nom féminin', feminine noun.

So, chaise is feminine.

When we are referring to nouns in English, we have the word "the" beforehand. In French, we either use "le" or "la".

"La" is for feminine words, and "le" is for masculine words.

We learned that chaise is feminine, so it would be "La chaise".