I do not understand why some words in French start with "le" "la" "une" or "un". Why isn't it just "the" or "a"?

French can be confusing like that! In English, nouns are neither feminine or masculine. So you can always use the same articles such as "a" or "the". In French, each word has a gender. For a feminine word you would have to use "la" or "une", and for a masculine word you would have to use "le" ou "un".Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing is a word is masculine or feminine. Let's admit it, it is quite sad to have to give a gender to a word! But that is how grammar works in French. So a word like chicken is masculine, whilst a world like forest is feminine, making it "le poulet" and "la forêt".The only way to really know a word's grammatical gender is to learn it. That is why learning vocabulary when you are learning a language is absolutely key. It can get a bit frustrating when one is confronted to a huge list of words, but the more your learn them, the more you can speak the language correctly!