Each Spanish noun has a gender, meaning it's classified as either masculine or feminine. When you first start learning Spanish, you'll learn the basics of beginner Spanish — enough to be able to carry a basic conversation with a Spanish speaker. The Spanish verbs ser and estar ("to be") will become quite familiar to you as well. I don't think you can demand that a language change a fundamental part of their grammar because it makes you "confused" or it's "too hard to learn". If you changed everything to masculine for example, most of the words in Spanish and Italian would then end in "o" and it would totally change the flow and sound of the language.
Or will you just change the definite article to one of the genders? You'd end up calling a woman "il donna" in Italian, or "el mujer" in Spanish. In language learning there are just a lot of things you have to let go of needing an answer for why it is the way it is.
Like stop being bitter about it, just be better lol. No one put gender there on purpose to trip you up or be sexist, it's just how the language developed over history. There is a pattern with words with an initial stressed /a/ sound, such as agua ("water"), that makes them seem ambiguous in gender, but they are not. Such words take the masculine article, both definite and indefinite , in the singular form; they also take the singular modifiers algún and ningún when those modifiers precede the nouns. Similar words include el alma / un alma ("soul"), el ala / un ala ("wing"), el águila / un águila ("eagle"), and el hacha / un hacha ("axe").
Still they are feminine and, as such, they take feminine modifiers in both singular and plural forms, and they take feminine articles in the plural form as in las aguas frías. When discussing Spanish nouns, we must also talk about Spanish adjectives. Adjectives in Spanish must "agree" with the nouns they modify. This means that their endings must reflect the gender and the number of the noun to which they refer. An adjective like rojo ("red") can modify a singular, masculine noun like el libro ("the book") to give us el libro rojo ("the red book"). But if the noun is feminine, like la mesa ("the table"), we get the expression la mesa roja ("the red table").
If the nouns are plural, the adjective endings change to reflect that, and we get expressions like los libros rojos ("the red books") and las mesas rojas ("the red tables"). First, we will look at a few guidelines related to the gender of nouns in Spanish. After that, we will review the use of the singular and plural forms of masculine and feminine nouns in Spanish. So there are four ways to say "the" in Spanish — el libro, los libros, laplaya, lasplayas. The definite article "the" merely changes to agree in gender and number with the noun.
I have to say, as a native speaker of Portuguese, I never thought about genders in nouns or how adjectives have to match in gender as well…because I don't think about gender when I use Portuguese. I can't speak for all people who are native speakers of languages with genders. English speakers refer to a broom, fork, or any other inanimate object as "it," a gender-neutral pronoun.
In Spanish and many other world languages, on the other hand, all nouns — including inanimate objects, places, ideas, etc. — have gender, too. La escoba is feminine and el tenedor is masculine. Even the countries El Ecuador and La India are masculine and feminine, respectively. Spanish direct object pronouns like me, te, lo, and la are an essential part to a Spanish speakers vocabulary so it's important that you fully grasp this concept. Now let's say that same sentence using indirect object pronouns. In English, it would be "I bought pizza for him." In Spanish, that would be Le compré pizza.
What Does Noun In Spanish Like the direct object pronouns, indirect object pronouns come before the verb, too. Note that se is also used for the formal "you" (usted/ustedes). The unusual thing about words that end in–istais that they will be used for both males and females. The article will indicate the gender of the person the noun represents. Notice that it will seem strange to use a word ending in–ato refer to a male.
If you make a note of the nouns that break these general rules when you learn them, you'll avoid a lot of mistakes later. Like English nouns, most Spanish nouns have singular and plural forms. In addition, Spanish nouns referring to people and animals often have different masculine and feminine forms, which means that these nouns can have up to four forms – learn more. Tandem learning is a technique where two people who speak different native languages meet up to help each other learn, swapping roles as teacher and student. This is an effective method when both people are able to commit significant time and thought to the partnership, but keep in mind that not everyone is a good teacher. Once you do this, you will be a happier Spanish student because of it.
I'm completely confident you will be speaking with Spanish direct object pronouns in no time. Spanish adjectives must agree in gender and number with the nouns they describe so that they can accurately and precisely describe the noun or pronoun in question. When the noun or pronoun is masculine/feminine, the Spanish adjective describing it must also be masculine/feminine. Likewise, when the noun or pronoun is singular/plural, its verb and any adjectives describing it must also be singular/plural. Yet 2nd language English learners are often encouraged to report such expressions as 'me and Jane's goin t't cinema tonight' as 'wrong'.
Yet this is how most of my neighbours would speak. This is what makes learning masculine and feminine Spanish nouns easier than other romance languages such as French. The first step to mastering the use of definite and indefinite articles in Spanish is to get the genders of nouns down to pat. Learn Spanish For Travel — When you have Spanish in your back pocket, you have a passport to a whole new world. Learning Spanish not only means you'll be able to navigate new cities by reading road signs, menus, and train tickets; it also lets you connect with the new people you meet there. It's often said that the best way to explore a new place is through the eyes of a local, and learning Spanish lets you branch out of tourist hotspots and into the real world as the native speakers see it.
Use Language To Train Your Brain — Picking up a new language is an especially sound way to keep your brain flexible and nimble, especially as you grow older. Don't give in to the argument that you're somehow worse at learning languages after your youth! Picking up a new language is more than just memorizing lists of vocab (though you'll certainly sharpen your lexical recall along the way). If you've been lacking intellectual stimulation, there are few better ways to exercise your mental muscles than by learning Spanish. My name is Jaklien Wotte, I am from The Netherlands. I studied for two weeks at iNMSOL in Granada in septembre 2009, I followed an intensive Spanish course, level A2.
I spoke a little bit of Spanish, but I wanted to learn proper Spanish, make sentences, something that I wasn´t able to do yet. I was also very positive about the flexibility of the school . I followed partly private lessons, what also was a possibility. Granada is of course, beside all of this, a extraordinary beautiful and living city.
The school organised activities every night, like a tapas tour, a tour in the Albaícin or a tour to the mountains, Alpujarras, in the weekends. Sometimes the school organised special classnights, were for example the streetlanguage of Andalusia and films were spoken. My Spanish language progressed a lot, exactly what I wanted.
I had a splendid time and I would return to this school for another course. As established before, un and uno as well as their feminine form 'una' are used to talk about indefinite things. However, these words are also used in other situations by Spanish speakers. Although it's possible that you won't learn these uses in a grammar class, you should be aware that they are very common and applying them correctly will help you improve your conversations. There are some general rules for identifying the gender of nouns. Usually, you can gauge by the endings of certain nouns whether they are masculine or feminine.
Here are some rules for identifying feminine nouns. Notice that the direct object pronoun goes before the verb, though. In most situations, Spanish has the same sentence structure as English (Subject-Verb-Object). But when it comes to direct object pronouns, it's Subject-Direct Object Pronoun-Verb. In the first person and second person forms, it's generally quite clear who the speaker is and who the direct addressee is, so usually Spanish speakers leave out yo and tú right off the bat.
However, when first introducing a third person entity into a conversation, you'll of course need to use a subject. Afterwards, when a subject pronoun would usually be necessary in English, you can simply skip it and go straight to the verb. Just as the English pronouns he/she denote gender, Spanish pronouns also need to be changed depending on who you are speaking about. Unlike English, the plural pronouns "we" (nosotros/nosotras), "you all" (vosotros/vosotras), and "they" (ellos/ellas) need to be changed to match the gender of the group. Some Spanish pronouns are used differently than English ones, so reading and listening to Spanish is crucial to noticing how they are used by native speakers.
Exposing yourself to as much Spanish as possible is the best way to get the hang of pronouns (especially indirect pronouns which get moved before the verb!). Many English speakers find concordancia, or gender agreement rules, incredibly challenging when they first learn Spanish. Not only do you have to learn new vocabulary and conjugations, but you also have to make sure the nouns and adjectives in your sentence agree, or match with respect to gender and number. The definite articles EL, LA, LOS, LAS correspond to THE and they are used before abstract nouns in Spanish like AMOR and SENTIMIENTO.
Having said that, the two nouns in this sentence are AMOR and SENTIMIENTO. EL is an article, ES a form of the verb SER, MUY an adverb and LINDO is an adjective. We will learn more about all of them in future lessons.
Remember that gender in Spanish, for the most part, is not about sex, but is simply an arbitrary category. The terms masculine and feminine really mean nothing more than noun class A and noun class B. Because grammatical gender is fairly arbitrary, it is essential to memorize a noun's gender along with its spelling and pronunciation. Like French, every noun in Spanish is allocated a gender, either male or female.
So, when creating a sentence, you need to match the right variation of words. Sure, you could memorise each and every word, but that's hardly efficient learning. Luckily, there are some simple rules to help you master the different genders of words.
The goal of learning any language is to have real-life conversations with native speakers. So a language learning app should be designed to get you to that goal in the best way possible. Don't worry if you can't master a typical Spanish accent or Spanish pronunciation right away; it takes time and practice! The best way to remember these rules is just to practice over and over, especially by reading texts out loud. Watching Spanish TV and movies or listening to Spanish podcasts, radio and film can certainly help you master Spanish pronunciation and sound like a native Spanish speaker.
I can tell you that it was really good experience. I wish I had been able to stay there much longer. Being in Spain, in Granada makes you speak Spanish from the first moment you are there. I took intensive Spanish courses four hours a day. The first two hours were based on speaking, and the other two were based on grammar. However, you can experience the best Spanish learning in the street, with friends in and out school.
I shared a flat with two other friends from other countries and we communicated in Spanish most of the time. They were really nice people, friendly and helpful all the time. Our flat was in the city center and ten minutes to the school. We always encouraged each other to speak Spanish.
We met after school, organized short trips in and out town, went dancing after school. There are historical places like Alhambra and the Cathedral. If you are interested in flamenco, you can enjoy Sacramonte. You can go out to tapas bars, where you buy a drink and get free starters.
Actually, you can walk everywhere or take the bus. If you like travelling, you can easily go to other cities at weekends. You can take a coach to Cordoba, Seville etc. at the bus station or take a train. The school organizes excursions to those places at weekends and on... I am no expert, but maybe gender started for the words that do relate to gender or things men use or women use. When it came time to codify gender articles from neighboring valleys, the winning choice may have been picked for a variety of reasons, leaving a pattern that seems arbitrary today.
Since sex is a very important emotional part of our brains, maybe a sex tag helped early people to tag and remember words as vocabulary grew. Now we should simplify language for easier learning. In some languages, grammatical gender is more than just "male" or "female." Some languages have a "neuter" class, while others have different genders for animate versus inanimate objects. A noun is a naming word used for a person, thing, place or idea. In Spanish, all nouns are either masculine or feminine. The word for 'the' or 'a' changes depending on the gender of the noun and whether it is singular or plural.
Luckily, pronoun forms are very closely related, so it's usually easy to figure out what they mean when reading or listening to Spanish. On the flip side, one letter or accent mark can completely change the meaning, meaning their relatedness can lead to some difficulty when speaking or writing Spanish. In particular, masculine nouns terminating in -o change the final vowel into -a. On the other hand, when a masculine noun ends in consonant (non-vowels) it forms its corresponding feminine form by adding a final -a. Because coming from English you don't have any reference to hold on to, sometimes our memory can only recall so much and we mix up the gender. Even though Spanish is a language of exceptions, there are a few guidelines that can help when wanting to determine if a noun is feminine or masculine.
All of these rules use the ending of a word as a trick to determine its gender. When you are talking about a group of males and females, always use the masculine plural form of the noun, definite article and adjective. That said, there are some tendencies in the gender of nouns, but there are always exceptions. I will list the patterns that I have noticed, but please don't use these as a way to avoid learning the genders of nouns – just learn each word as gender + noun and then you'll know them forever.
The fact that inanimate objects have a gender in Spanish does not mean that things like tables and books are physically feminine or masculine. They have genders in a grammatical sense and must be used with articles and adjectives that match their gender. The concept of gender can feel confusing for new students of Latin languages.
