masculin or feminine

Question

how do you know if something is "masculino" or "femenino" ?

Answer 1

Reading this and this lesson will teach you the main rules.

You can usually tell by the ending of the Spanish word. When you start from the English word then don't rely too much on logic, cuz although many workshop tools are masculine and household tools tend to be feminine, dress (vestido) is still masculine. So there'll be a lot of grinding if you wanna be proficient in this.

Memorization is key! - francobollo, Oct 23, 2012

Answer 2

Some 95% of words in Spanish follow the following rules:

If a word ends in any of the following: -ma -r -e -n -o -l -s, the word is usually masculine (with definite and indefinite articles of: el/los un/unos)

If a word ends in any of the following: -a -d -ión -sis -itis -umbre, the word is usually feminine (with definite and indefinite articles of: la/las una/unas)

Although there are few exceptions to the rules, they do exist.

Some exceptions to the above rules for example:

cama (meaning bed) ends in -ma but it is a female word.

mapa (meaning map) ends in -a but it is a masculine word.

mano (meaning hand) ends in -o but it is a feminine word

I hope this helps and is clear to you! But, like the others have said, because there are irregulars, some words genders need to be learned (not memorized). Memorizing is different from knowing. Memorizing that mano is female is different from saying el mano and realizing that it sounds incorrect.

Answer 3

Good question and answer.

I seem to have run into the most exceptions to those loose rules in the form of words that end in 'e' but are feminine. There's a good list of them at the below link, and a good comment about words (la foto, la moto etc) which appear to break the rules, until you know they're short for longer words (la fotografía, la motocicleta etc)

Hope this helps too

http://www.e-spanyol.hu/en/grammar/gender.php

Thanks for the learning link. These are always helpful. - Jubilado, Oct 24, 2012