Portuguese · Chapter 1 · Lesson 12 · Grammar primer
Noun gender and plurals
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification.
The short version
O dia breaks every gender rule you just learned
O dia (day) ends in -a but is masculine, and a mão (hand) ends in -ão but is feminine. Both are common enough that guessing from the ending will burn you, so learn these two as flashcards rather than logic.
O dia está bonito.
Casarão has nothing to do with getting married
It looks like the verb casar (to marry) with an ending stuck on, but casarão is an augmentative of casa, meaning a big, imposing house. The resemblance is a coincidence worth knowing before it misleads you.
Ele mora num casarão antigo.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
Read the full article · 9 min readPractice
Practise this lesson
10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 21 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 12 of 18 in this chapter