Noun gender in Spanish: heterónimos

We've seen some rules to determine the gender of a noun in Spanish. But language is usually like life, a lot of rules don't apply sometimes. This might be the case of it. Heterónimos in Spanish have a different word to talk about ladies & gentlemen.
If we look at the word itself and we break it down we find:
hetero- which is a prefix we borrowed from the Greek language and means "distinct, different, other"
ónimo- a greek suffix that meant "name"
After the analysis we put the pieces together and we see that the buzzword means "a different name" which clarifies a bit our purpose. 
It is worth it to do this deep comprehension practices with your students, they might like to know the history of the words (sometimes;)
We are plenty of examples in our languages from this structure but two will be enough to illustrate the idea: sinónimo / antónimo.
Along with this brief lines about today's topic there is a visual resource ready to use in class.

Data is not information, information is not knowledge, 

knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.

Clifford Stoll

Lunaprofe 3/09/2015  No comment

Noun gender in Spanish: Special rules [compilation]

We know that life is not that easy as we learn a rule and everything works just great. We know it's a little bit more difficult than that and so are languages. 
We've seen in previous posts some interesting tips and rules to learn the noun gender in Spanish, but still we'll find more nouns ending in a different letter that doesn't apply to any of those. Now it is the time to get a little deeper into it. Everything in a language has a reason to be, but we don't need to explore all of them to learn basic Spanish.
The poster attached to this post is a simple summary of special rules applying to noun gender in Spanish, but to make them more accessible to our students we can work with it in different ways (to diversify is always a great choice).

We can group them by gender, like:

Generally, a noun is masculine in Spanish if it ends in:

• - o: el 
• - or: el amor, el olor, el dolor, el amargor, el anterior, el sabor, el ardor...
• - aje: el coraje, el paisaje, el garaje, el masaje, el mestizaje, el dopaje... 
• - ema: el problema, el tema, el lexema, el esquema, el poema, el sistema...

Regularly, a noun is feminine in Spanish if it ends in:

• - a: la casa, la almohada, la aceitera, la anchura, la daga, la 
• - dad: la normalidad, la ciudad, la verdad, la cavidad, la nulidad, la disponibilidad, la diversidad, la deportividad, la exclusividad...
• - tad: la libertad, la amistad, la lealtad, la tempestad, la pubertad, la facultad, la voluntad, la enemistad, la deslealtad, la majestad...

We can also give our students a list of nouns and ask them to group them by masculine or feminine in two different columns:

tema, mano, masaje, olor, árbol, amistad, canción, igualdad, libertad, problema, radio, garaje, amor, función, maternidad, lealtad, día, moto, peaje, sabor, condición, nocturnidad, mitad, sofá, foto, paisaje, error, formación, paternidad

Masculine nouns	Feminine nouns
el error	la paternidad

Check with this "The odd one out" [in Spanish: encuentra al intruso] your understanding of what we have been talking about:

Check your answers

Children must be taught HOW TO THINK,

not what to think.

Margaret Mead

Lunaprofe 12/05/2014  No comment

Noun gender in Spanish: General rule

To know the gender of the nouns in Spanish is crucial because all articles, adjectives, pronouns... need to agree with the noun in gender when you are making a sentence.
Also, in terms of agreement, the masculine noun goes with El and the feminine noun goes with La, like in 

El libro / La hoja 

[We are always talking about the singular form]

We already talked about an acronym than can help us remembering which ones are masculine and feminine: LONERS. This is certainly a very useful tool to learn this important concept when learning Spanish, but as we always say there are no magic tricks when learning languages but there are patterns that can help us in the process.
The most general rule is simple and easy as you can see in the poster we present in this post. 

• masculine nouns end in -o
• feminine nouns end in -a

Masculine nouns	Feminine nouns
El perro	La perra
El gato	La gata
El niño	La niña
El chico	La chica
El abuelo	La abuela
El tío	La tía
El primo	La prima
El nieto	La nieta
El sobrino	La sobrina
El cuñado	La cuñada

Do this online activity to check if you understood what we talked about:
Check your answers ;)

Related posts:

• An acronym to learn noun genders: LONERS

Education is not the learning of facts,

but the training of the mind to think.

Albert Einstein

Lunaprofe 12/01/2014  No comment

An acronym to learn noun gender: LONERS

I know simplification can be a problem if we don't understand what it is and everything it comes with it... but if we truly understand that simplification doesn't mean we are going to live in a perfect world and we still have to face trouble because of the exceptions... can be a great tool to work with and can be very beneficial for our students.
This poster strives to be a colorful resource to remember our acronym: LONERS for masculine nouns in Spanish and also provides examples for each ending. 
Matching colors are a great strategy for visual learners to remember things. 

Try yourself out with this activity below to see if you internalize this concept:


Let's recap:

If a word ends in l,o,n,e,r,s it's almost always going to be a masculine word in Spanish.

Remember: in language there are no rules without exceptions ;)

If this works for you don't hesitate to use it, share it or print it out;)

More related resources:

• Short, simple and clear explanation [Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition]
• A Wikibook [A brief explanation with tables]

Don't put a limit on anything.

The more you dream, the farther you get.

Michael Phelps

22 medals

Lunaprofe 11/24/2014  No comment