Understanding Italian Noun Gender Rules for Language Learners

why is Porta feminine in Italian and telephone masculine what is noun gender are you confused by the whole idea of gender in Italian how can a noun have gender what does it all mean s the founder of Italy Made Easy where we specialize in helping people like you successfully learn Italian you can find out more at italymedeasy.com but now let's begin coming if you are a beginner of Italian then noun gender is one of the first topics that you're going to come across and it can seem very confusing at first especially if you're an English speaker gender is a super important part of the Italian language that you simply cannot Escape it runs

through the entire language and it's very important that you understand what it is and how it all works and I'm going to help you with that first things first when we talk about noun gender in Italian this has nothing to do with whether things are male or female nothing of that sort so what's still about Manu well the answer actually isn't that exciting it's got to do with grammar so when we talk about noun gender in languages like Italian we are talking about a grammatical concept not a biological or psychological concept grammatical gender simply put is or rather was a way of classifying nouns into categories based on the grammatical Behavior I'll explain the idea of grammatical Behavior later in the video

so don't worry if it all sounds still a little confusing right now it'll make sense by the end of the video now interestingly the original meaning of gender when it first entered the English language from French was exactly that it meant category kind or class with no specific connotations or relation to humans or human gender in fact the word noun gender in Italian is Genera same as French which means category or type in Italian we'll say things like que genre de musica scoti what genre of music do you listen to It's that kind of generate genre not gender so just to reiterate noun gender is about grammatical categories not about the English concept of gender as in relation to humans

actually many of the world's languages have noun gender German and many European languages have three genders some Australian and African languages even have five or more genders English used to have noun gender but it got ditched during the Middle English period wouldn't things be much easier for you if English had kept it but you know we're working with what we're working so anyway Italian on the other hand kept it relatively simple All Things Considered with just two noun genders masculine and feminine now don't let the terms fool you the categorization of nouns as either masculine or feminine has once again nothing to do with whether a thing has a manly feature or a girly

appearance for example what's feminine about a door Porta or what's masculine about a flower Fiore is the sun stereotypically masculine and the moon La Luna obviously feminine of course not sometimes English speakers tend to think that noun gender might have to do with the person who uses the item mostly so for example I've heard the theories of a hammer martello being masculine in Italian because stereotypically it's men who use hammers or flowers being feminine which is which they're not it's actually masculine but English speakers might tend to think that Fiora should be feminine because typically women receive flowers or anything like that now if you try to make connections like this you will probably be complicating things for

yourself as there really isn't any clear reason why some nouns are masculine and others are feminine they just are so when it comes to Italian nouns then how do you know if a noun is masculine or feminine let's look at them separately it's actually a lot easier than you might think while it might still remain complex at the end let's say masculine nouns as a general rule announce the end in o like the o sound the O vowel Libra is book tableau table work numero number these are all examples of masculine words in Italian now there are cases that will confuse you where the noun gender of a word does match the biological gender of the living being that the word is being referred to

typically humans so nouns that refer to males are also masculine in gender so ragazzo boy Bambino young baby male baby former man but this is just a coincidence and we shouldn't think of a masculine noun having anything to do with the masculine gender like I said it's just a group it's a type of word Unfortunately they picked masculine and feminine as word to describe these but yeah that's what it is now looking at feminine nouns as a general rule feminine nouns end in a the a vowel so Casa house Italia Italy Mela Apple parola word these are all feminine nouns as we saw for masculine nouns words for biological females are also feminine nouns so we have words like ragatsa girl tambina

baby girl Donna woman again just a coincidence now while the general rule about nouns ending in o or a will help you get it right most of the time be aware that there are some nouns that end in o but are feminine or now they're ending ah but are masculine but that's just a small group and it shouldn't be a huge problem to you also there are a lot of nouns in Italian that end in e the E vowel both masculine and feminine nouns can end in the e sound and these are the trickier ones because you can't just look at them and assume that they are masculine or feminine because the a ending can work for either one keep in mind that one noun has its own gender and it will not change so a word like the dog

it happens to be masculinity but it's masculine we have another word like Ki which is feminine they both end in a one is masculine one is feminine they're not going to switch genders but don't freak out just yet for many of these rule-breaking nouns there are actually easy to remember patterns to know their gender or ways to figure it out based on the lava probability the more Italian words you know the more you will see these patterns we address that type of nouns in other videos here on our channel for now let's go with the O and I ending rule which is the best way to start with and to guess mostly right most of the time so you might be wondering why is gender even important

when I'm learning Italian as I mentioned at the beginning of this video gender in Italian is really important because so much of the language is impacted by noun gender remember when I say that gender was about categorizing nouns based on the grammatical Behavior well without getting too much into the details of this the gender of a noun affects all the words around it that refer back to it in other words masculine and feminine nouns behave in a certain way grammatically they tell all the other words that refer to it I'm masculine you need to be masculine or I'm feminine you need to be feminine too this concept is called agreement and it's when nouns make words agree with their gender the types of words that have to agree with

the noun that they're referring to are articles adjectives past participles that's kind of complex but when you speak in the past tense basically so let's look at some examples so that you get an idea of what I'm talking about in Italian we'll say Alto e Bianco la vistaieri El table let's look at this sentence and see what is happening here so the meaning of the sentence is the table is tall and white I saw it yesterday the noun tavolo is masculine this is the star of the sentence the king of the sentence let's say how do we know it's masculine well we kind of can guess by the ending of the word being tavolo with an O at the end and so once we know that word behaves masculinally or as a masculine

word grammatically speaking we can see how everything else reflects that masculinity look at what it did to the other words that refer back to tavolo it makes all of them be masculine now if you don't know enough Italian you will not know that ill before tavolo is the masculine way of saying that so even that the is reflecting the fact that Tableau is masculine but then all the other words are ending in all because they need to be masculine as well because we're talking about the if you replace the word Tableau with any other masculine noun even one that didn't end in o like Kane for example it would still behave the exact same way and the sentence would be pretty much the same so I would say so the dog is tall and white and I'm

sorry yesterday again we know it's a masculine noun because it has a masculine effect on the words that refer to it if we were to take the same sentence and use a feminine noun like Kaza we would hear the following statement the house is tall and white I saw it yesterday here we have a feminine noun Casa so we know it's feminine because it ends in R we can assume it's feminine and it behaves in a feminine way because of the effect that it has on the other words that refer to it makes them all end in ah or most of them if we were using other adjectives so if we took a feminine noun like that ended in a for example like la Patricia the washing machine the sentence would be just the same

so the washing machine is tall and white as or yesterday sorry for the silly examples but they're just here to give you an idea of what I'm talking about all of this is to show you what noun gender really means and how it works in Italian another reason why it's important to know the gender of nouns is because there are a lot of examples in Italian of words that differ only in gender but have a completely different meaning that is different words that differ only in their final vowel either o or ah for example Porto masculine word IL Porto the port the harbor and then we have PARTA so we go from Porto Port Porta door one is masculin so we'll say IL Porto Bello the beautiful Port La Porta Bella

the beautiful door as you can see everything is masculine feminine the case La Casa the house means way as in how you do things and Moda is fashion the way you dress IL model La Moda this means that by accidentally getting the gender of a noun wrong you can completely change the meaning of a sentence and end up saying what you didn't mean Beyond just the O and ah ending rule for remembering which nouns are masculine and feminine we really recommend learning a noun with its correct gendered article as it will help you remember the noun gender even more so that's why when I was giving you the example of Porto I said IL Porto it's a lot easier for you to learn the word for port for Harbor by using the

article as well because IL Porto confirms your theory that Porter should be a masculine word because it ends with o if you don't just learn Kane meaning dog because then you think of Kane what gender was that just learn ilkane ilkane is the dog but ill is the article that means da that is only for masculine words and you will learn that if you learn Italian with us.com