non-gender in Italian can be a pretty confusing topic especially for English speakers since you don't have it in your language but I'm here to help you understand how it all works so you can start using it correctly when it comes to noun gender in Italian you probably have already heard the general rule by which masculine nouns end in o and feminine nouns end in ah that is a pretty good guide and it works for most nouns ending in O and ah there are of course exceptions but you might have already noticed that there are a lot of nouns in Italian that end in e so what about them well the problem is that there are both masculine and feminine nouns that end in a so how do you know which one is which

ciao I'm Manu venditti the founder of Italy Medici where we help people like you successfully learn Italian all the way to fluency if that's what you want you can find out more at italymedeasy.com but now let's begin coming chamo alright I'll start by giving you a handy tip for nouns are ending e it really helps to learn the noun with its matching article although I'd recommend doing that for all nouns pretty much seeing as many of these nouns don't always follow a clear pattern learning them with the article will help you remember the agenda if Italian articles are another topic that you are struggling to wrap your head around then make sure you watch this video where we talk about Italian articles so here are 10 very common

e-ending nouns that don't follow any particular pattern and that you should know as a beginner of Italian let's start with masculine nouns ending in e in fuma ilmare za il no me ilkane and now five very common feminine nouns ending in e have la parte la cancione lafina and la lucha for this really common nouns it's simply a matter of memorizing their gender by learning them with the correct article another important thing when it comes to the gender of these types of words is to remember what noun gender is actually all about we did a whole video that explained the what why and how of noun gender so if you haven't seen that video yet I recommend you watch it at the end of this video basically the main deal with noun gender

is that it is a way of classifying nouns into grammatical categories based on how they behave grammatically that is what effect do they have on the sentence and the words they refer back to them this is really handy to think about especially when it comes to nouns that end in e because you can't go off the simple rule that masculine nouns end in awe and feminine nouns ending ah so if you aren't sure about the gender of a noun that ends in a then look at how it behaves in the sentence what does it do to the words that refer back to it such as the Articles adjectives past participles the form that the surrounding words take will tell you the gender of the noun of course you can only do this if you are listening or

reading Italian but it's a handy way to instantly know the gender of any noun including the ones that end in N let's take the word piede for example which means foot nothing about Pierre and its form tells you whether it's masculine or feminine so let's see how it behaves inside a sentence can you guess the gender of Pierre based on all the other words in the sentence both the adjectives and the possessive end in o and there's a definite article must be a masculine noun what about the word vocale which means vowel La vocale we see that both the adjectives and in ah and there's the definite article la so vocale must be feminine and now let's look at a few handy tips and cheats that can help you know what the gender is

when you actually want to use these words here's the thing that almost nobody knows it's all about the letters that come before the final e a lot of Italian nouns that end in e come with a certain combination of letters preceding it these combinations of letters form patterns of word endings that usually categorize them as masculine or feminine learn the small number of easy to remember word endings and you'll have a much easier time knowing the gender of any word ending in these letters this method is not completely foolproof obviously but it's the best trick you'll have to getting the gender right 95 of the time which is pretty good so let's start with masculine nouns ending in e the first

group is words ending ore these can be nouns they represent a male's role a profession or when a male is the doer of the action when I say male's role I mean that the role being talked about is performed by a man and not something stereotypically masculine or anything like that so let's look at these masculine words that end in that's a male doctor Latorre a male actor male writer IL fumatore a male smoker did you notice that these words correspond with the English word ending in or as in doctor actor or ER as in writer smoker these are the same word endings that we often use in English to say that someone is a doer of something there are many more examples of this ore ending nouns in Italian that correspond

to ER or nouns in English many of them are also considered cognites with English what are cognates you ask cognates are words in Italian and English that have the same origin have the same meaning and look and sound very similar to each other for example look at these masculine nouns that directly correspond to English or nouns I bet you can guess their meaning before I even say it IL creator again remember these words in the masculine gender are only used when referring to men so far all of these ore nouns have been referring to humans but there are also a lot of non-human masculine nouns that end in ore like IL color now the second pattern that I want to look at is masculine nouns that end in which means the country of Japan IL fifone a coward

a mama's boy IL calzone there's not much more to say about this particular one as it's pretty straightforward notice that in every word here a consonant comes before the owner this will be very important for later when we see a feminine pattern that looks kind of the same remember that there is one very common feminine noun that ends in honor we saw that earlier so as long as you remember that can Sone is feminine so like an exception then you'll be right with this rule that words ending on a tend to be masculine now we're going to take a look at some common patterns to identify feminine nouns that end in e the first word ending pattern for feminine nouns ending in e is Sione it is pretty safe to say that

words ending in Sione are always feminine the station the lesson information emotion I'm sure you noticed that most of these words correspond exactly with the English word ending Sean pretty much every word that ends in shown in English has an equivalent Italian word ending in Sione in Italian this is why learning cognites in Italian will really help you grow your Italian vocabulary very quickly because it's fairly easy right you could probably tell me the meaning of 99 of Sione cognas just by reading them learning that Sione equals Sean pattern for cognites can even help you guess how to say an English word in Italian if you just make it up and you probably would be right most of the time

you're guessing for example how do you think you'd say the word for portion in Italian la portiona what about option now as I keep saying these patterns are not completely foolproof but you will be right in most cases than not for example the Italian word vacation which does exist doesn't mean vacation but it refers to the act of leaving a position a job vacant the word for vacation is vacancy anyway the important thing to remember is that Sione words in Italian are always feminine nouns as are the words in the next group and these are words that end in Sione just like the words the ending Sione these are always feminine let's look at some examples confusion La pacione passion La versiona

illusion you can see the exact same pattern here as we saw with words ending in Sione that is to say that words that end in Sione Alden usually have cognates in English ending in Sion you probably didn't even need a translation to know the meaning of the words I just said right the next pattern of word endings for feminine nouns is for words that end in triche these can be nouns they represent a female's role a profession or when a woman is the doer of the action they are basically the female equivalent of the masculine ore nouns that we saw earlier for example La triche as an actress Las critricha that's a female writer that's a female smoker this Italian word ending triche is the equivalent of the

English word ending stress or simply s in English that it's used to refer to a role performed by a woman words like waitress mistress Duchess now although those particular words don't have a triche equivalent in Italian the idea is the same now I'm sure you remember the masculine ore coconuts that we learned at the beginning of the video editore creator well see how you go transforming them to the feminine so we have creatorre which in the feminine is in the feminine meaning a woman who's editing lady Treacher it's interesting though that in this case English doesn't have a Tres form for those words like creatress narrate dress or edit stress that sound awkward but it would be cool and it

would make sense if we had them in English right but we do have them in Italian anyway there are some other non-human nouns ending in Tricia like we saw for the masculine order version these are usually feminine words again for example which is a washing machine La chica triche which is a scar finally the last word ending pattern that I want to tell you about that identifies feminine nouns ending in words that end in aze other to be fair there are only a few words in this group but they're quite common and you would be pretty handy to learn them and to be able to recognize them and know that they are feminine nouns these words also have cognates uh matching words in English and these are

words in English and in A's pronounced A's or A's depending on the word these are words such as La frase sentence or phrase la baze it's worth pointing out that there are nouns ending in air that can be either masculine or feminine that is the same word that can be either gender how is that possible let me show you what I mean the nouns that we're talking about are nouns that end in ante and enter again there are a lot of words in Italian and most of them are either masculine or feminine they're not going to change gender but when these words refer to people to a person then the gender is determined by the person that the word is being referred to these nouns are actually fairly easy to learn as you only need to learn the one

word and then use it to refer it to either a male or a female and just change the article depending on the gender of the person let's start with the words ending in antev some examples are IL cantante which is a male singer but then we have La cantante it's a female singer IL birbante which is a male Rascal and La birbante it's a female Rascal and the second group that behaves similarly are words that ending ente for example IL patient that's a male patient La paciente that's a female patient IL cliente a male customer La cliente a female customer as you can see these nouns are not changing they simply just have the one form and what changes is the article and of course what also would change are the adjectives referred to the people so for

example and that's it for today grazimile and I will see you in the next video here on little meet easy ciao