Nouns are words which stands for presents, things, places or abstract concepts. "Laura", "sheer", "Madrid" and "freedom" at all nouns. You will need to learn that the concepts of gender and number are important in relation to the noun, which can be either masculine or feminine, and singular or oral.

Nouns have gender. In Spanish all nouns, including those that signify an object, are either masculine or feminine. So, for instance, mesa (table) is a feminine noun, and libro (book) is a masculine noun. It is important to know whether a noun is masculine or feminine as other words in a sentence have to agree with it in gender. Compare: el niño alto (a tall boy) and la niña alta (the tall girl). The article (el or la, "the") and the adjective alto or alta ("tall") that accompany the noun (niño, boy, or niña, girl) have to agree in gender and number with the noun itself.

The gender of the most nouns used to name people or animals depends on whether the person or animal is male or female. In Spanish, nouns denoting things abstract concepts also have a grammatical gender, which means that they too are either masculine or feminine. All nouns and Spanish are either masculine or feminine.

In general, nouns ending in -o are masculine and those that end in -a are feminine. The gender of nouns that end in -e or those that do not fit into any of the categories above is not easy to predict. When learning new vocabulary, it is important to learn the gender of the words to. The best way of doing this is to learn the noun with its article, so that you remember the word is masculine or feminine. If you look a noun up in the dictionary it will tell you it's gender, as masculine nouns are usually followed by the letter m, and feminine nouns by the letter f.

Despite what I've just said about the difficulties surrounding some aspects of Spanish, it is actually quite an easy language to learn. I've been teaching Spanish courses in community colleges for almost 2 decades, and it never ceases to amaze me how quickly people pick up the basics.
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