Question for people learning spanish
Hello. This is probably a silly question! But, how do you guys know when a noun is femenine or masculine? Is there any rule? I'm a native spanish speaker and... I just know! So I was wondering how do you recognize them? or do you have to memorize them?
2 Answers
Hello, Matias,
First the word feminina is feminine in English. This is always a problem for English speakers because our nouns are usually neither feminine nor masculine but neuter. However the general rule: If it ends in "a", "-ad" or "-ión" it's usually feminine. If it ends in "o" it's masculine helps us. The rest we have to memorize, and of course there are a few words that end in "a" which are masculine.
Your English seems very good! Come back and correct some of our Spanish in the comment section if you can.
The answer is...we don't! Often, the ending gives it away, but that only gets you so far because any English speaker's first reaction would be to assume it's "la mapa." The rest, we memorize, so we know it's "el mapa." After a while, it "feels" masculine or feminine, but only when you've heard it enough to have the same natural reaction that a native speaker would.
For example, it "feels" wrong to me to hear "la día" or "el mano" despite the fact that they have endings that would otherwise indicate the opposite gender, but I am quite certain it sounded very natural to me when I first started learning spanish especially since at some point I had to literally look at a list of exceptions.
