Ch 1 · Lesson 7Spanish · Chapter 1 · Lesson 7 · Grammar primer
Noun gender
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
Trust the -o/-a rule, then learn the card
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Why?Hide
Nouns in -o are masculine and nouns in -a feminine well over nine times in ten, and -ción, -dad and -tud nouns are feminine. The exceptions fit on a card: , , , . Learn every noun with its article and the gender comes free.
Gender belongs to the word, not the thing
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Why?Hide
A house is not feminine in any real sense: the word is filed as feminine. So there is nothing to work out, only to store. Learn and , never bare . Then bet on the ending, because -o nouns are masculine and -a nouns feminine well over nine times in ten.
One gender, four words that agree
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Why?Hide
A noun's gender does not stay in the noun. It picks the article, the adjective ending and the pronoun that replaces it: , ; , . That is why a slip is so : in , two words out of three are wrong.
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.
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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 30 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 7 of 20 in this chapter