Welcome to this deck on Spanish nouns and articles. You'll learn one of the most fundamental parts of Spanish grammar: how nouns have a gender, either masculine or feminine. We'll cover the rules for telling them apart, how to make them plural, and how to use the correct words for 'the', 'a', and 'some' which are called articles.

In Spanish, every noun is either masculine or feminine. This is called grammatical gender. Let's start with masculine nouns. A general rule is that nouns ending in the letter 'o' are usually masculine. For example, the word for 'book' is 'libro'. Because it's masculine, the word for 'the' that goes with it is 'el'. So, 'the book' is 'el libro'.

While many masculine nouns end in 'o', there are important exceptions. For instance, many nouns that end in 'ma', 'pa', or 'ta' and come from Greek are masculine. A very common example is 'el problema', the problem. Notice it ends in 'a' but is masculine.