Correct use of words
Does "al baile" have "al" because "baile" ends with a vowel? Does "a la reunión" have "a la" because "reunión" ends with a constant?
2 Answers
Baile is a masculine noun. So you would expect to say "a el baile" much like "a la reunión". All nouns in Spanish have a gender (masculine or feminine). The word "the" chnages depending on the gender of the following word.
El chico (chico is masculine) => The boy
La chica (chica is feminine) => The girl
However try saying "a el baile" fast a couple of times. Eventually it'll get slurred together into something like "al baile". That's why in Spanish every time you'd say "a el" you simply combined them to say "al".
La clase => The class (feminine).
Voy a la clase => I'm going to the class.
El suceso => The event (masculine)
Voy al suceso => I'm going to the event.
No. Spanish has a system of noun classes, referred to as gender, whereby articles and adjectives that act to modify a noun must agree with the noun being modified. In this case, agreement means that the modifier take a particular form reserved for use with that particular noun class. Namely, the definite article "la" is used with the noun "reunión" because "la" is the form of the definite article that is reserved for use with this particular class of noun (i.e. "reunión" falls into the class of nouns referred to as "feminine"). Meanwhile, the word "al" is merely a contraction of the words "a" and "el." In this case, "el" is the masculine form of the definite article and is used to accompany the noun "baile" which, as you may have already surmised, falls into the other category of nouns (i.e. masculine nouns).
As far as how to determine which noun falls into what category, there are some general patterns that can be observed; however, many of these patterns also show exceptions, and it might be wiser to simply learn the gender of each new word as you encounter it (this is probably the most natural way of learning them, anyway).
