Sadly, most of the Spanish gender rules you find throughout the Internet are unreliable and plagued with exceptions.

A quick search for terms such as “Spanish gender rules” gives you a frightening number of sites stating, for instance, that “nouns ending in ‘e’ and nouns ending in a consonant are usually masculine”. The problem with these so-called rules is that there are simply thousands of Spanish feminine nouns ending in ‘e’ or a consonant.

My dilemma as a Spanish teacher is that I want to help my students learn the language as fast as possible at the same time as I steer them away from making basic mistakes. For that reason I prefer to ignore gender rules with a substantial number of exceptions, which leaves only three to follow.

So, in my opinion, these are the only gender rules consistent enough to be considered reliable:

 

1. Most Spanish nouns ending in ‘o’ as masculine.
2. Most Spanish nouns ending in ‘a’ are feminine.
3. Spanish nouns ending in ‘dad’, ‘tad’, ‘tud’, ‘ción’ ‘sión’, ‘gión’, ‘triz’ and ‘umbre’ are feminine.

 

Rule 3 is a golden rule, but in rules 1 and 2 (the rules that apply to the great majority of Spanish nouns) the word to watch out for is ‘most’. That’s why it’s good practice to learn all new nouns with their article, rather than on their own.

In other posts we’ll see a longer list of exceptions to these two rules, but here are some. As you can see, many are everyday words:

la mano – the hand
la foto – the photograph
la moto – the motorcycle
la modelo – the model
la radio – the radio

el día – the day
el gorila – the gorilla
el cólera – the cholera
el cura – the priest
el tranvía – the streetcar, the tramway

There’s an interesting group of nouns that, one could argue, rather than being an exception to Rule 2 above, have a rule of their own. Those are nouns of Greek origin ending in ‘ma’, ‘ta’ and ‘pa’ which are all masculine. Those nouns often look similar in English and Spanish:

el programa – the program, the programme
el problema – the problem
el mapa – the map
el cometa – the comet
el planeta – the planet

Briefly: the gender of nouns ending in ‘o’ and ‘a’ can be guessed in the great majority of cases, but the exceptions are often commonly used nouns. Other gender rules, except for Rule 3 above and that applying to nouns of Greek origin, are not reliable enough.

 

About me and my Spanish course

I have taught Spanish for over fifteen years and have two Spanish learning publications to my name. My latest work is the Spanish for beginners course at Spanish Bookworld.

This course come with dozens of online lessons for both adults and children, downloadable mp3s and videocasts, interactive ebooks, language learning articles and an exclusive forum where you can ask me your language questions.

Getting the gender of basic Spanish nouns wrong is not only frustrating, but also highly de-motivating. In this article I give you an insight on what causes this problem and I help you overcome it from today.

In my experience as a Spanish teacher, the reason why you find yourself making gender mistakes is because of the way you learned the nouns when you first came across them, and the way you’ve reviewed them afterwards.

You may be wondering, then, if there is a way of learning new Spanish nouns that will allow you to get the gender always right. The answer, without any doubt, is ‘yes’. Here are the two steps you need to follow:

1. Always learn new nouns with their article, rather than on their own, and review them with their article too.

2. Always learn new nouns with audio material, preferably audio flashcards.

I’ve recommend this way of learning new vocabulary to my students for many years. It’s the fastest and most efficient method, and the one I use in my Spanish for beginners online course and downloadable podcasts.

Learning nouns with their article the first time you come across them takes the same effort as learning them on their own, and it will save you a lot of time and frustration later on. So, for instance, instead of learning that:

‘flor’ means ‘flower’

Make sure you learn that:

‘la flor’ means ‘the flower’

This will guarantee that soon you won’t need to ask yourself anymore whether ‘flor’ comes with ‘el’ or ‘la’, because ‘la flor’ now sounds right to you, just like it sounds right to a native speaker.

As for audio flashcards, those are flashcards where you can hear the Spanish vocabulary said by a native speaker, and see or hear the English translations too.

Audio flashcards are an invaluable tool that allow you to learn new words accurately and faster than you ever imagined you could. They help you develop a good accent, and they make it easy and fun to review your vocabulary. You can play some examples of Spanish audio flashcards here.

Briefly, learning new vocabulary following the two steps I’ve described in this article is not only more efficient in the short, medium and long term, but also much more enjoyable.