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A BIT ABOUT SPANISH GRAMMAR BEFORE YOU BEGIN
Spanish
nouns have genders. Most words applied to persons have
natural gender: masculine like hombre ("male person")
or feminine, like mujer ("female person"). The gender
of some animals, things, and some words applied to persons doesn't follow
any rule: they have grammatical gender. Casa (house), rana
(frog), and visita (visitor) are of the feminine gender. Árbol
(tree), sapo (toad) and genio (genius) are of the
masculine gender. Invitado, invitada (guest) and mono,
mona (monkey) have natural gender. Fortunately, the gender of a
noun is usually (but not always) indicated by the last letter of the word;
-o indicates masculine nouns, and -a indicates feminine
nouns.
Adjectives
also have gender and number. Like nouns, -o usually indicates the
masculine form of the adjective, and -a indicates the feminine
form. Adding an -s at the end of an adjective or noun makes it
plural. Adjectives need to match the noun they describe in both gender and
number. For example, borracho "drunk", when modifying las
mujeres ("the women"), makes las mujeres borrachas.
In this guide, where genders of nouns or
adjectives comes up, we use the form "o/a" to differentiate. It
should be clear from context when to use the feminine and when to use the
masculine form.
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