How to remember Spanish noun gender
The rules that cover most nouns, the exceptions worth knowing, and how to make each noun's gender part of the way you remember it.
Every Spanish noun is either masculine (el) or feminine (la), and the gender changes the words around it: el libro rojo, la casa roja. Getting it wrong rarely stops anyone understanding you, so it’s easy to put off learning, and even advanced learners still slip on it.
A handful of rules cover most nouns. For the rest, make the gender part of the word from the first time you see it.
The rules that cover most nouns
| Ending | Usually | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| -o | el | el libro, el gato, el vaso |
| -a | la | la casa, la mesa, la playa |
| -ción, -sión | la | la canción, la televisión |
| -dad, -tad, -tud | la | la ciudad, la libertad, la actitud |
| -umbre | la | la costumbre, la legumbre |
| -ma (from Greek) | el | el problema, el sistema, el idioma, el clima, el tema |
| -e, or a consonant | Either | el coche, la noche; el árbol, la flor |
For -o and -a, the rule is right far more often than not, but a few everyday words break it, so learn these as you meet them:
- la mano (hand), la foto (short for la fotografía) and la moto (la motocicleta) are feminine.
- el día (day) and el mapa (map) are masculine.
- el agua (water) is feminine, but takes el because it starts with a stressed “a”. It’s still el agua fría, and in the plural, las aguas. The same goes for el águila and el hambre.
Nouns ending in -e or a consonant have no reliable rule. Those are the ones to learn one at a time.
How to make gender stick
Always learn the noun with its article
Learn “la casa”, with its article, from the first time you see it. Then you never have to remember the gender separately. On flashcards, put the article on the card, every time.
Learn it with an adjective
An adjective that changes with the gender gives you a second clue: el planeta rojo, la mano fría. When you’re not sure, the phrase often sounds right or wrong in a way the bare noun doesn’t.
Give each gender a colour
Colour coding is an old classroom trick. German students taught with colour-coded grammar scored 13 to 16 percent higher than students taught in black and white, in tests up to four weeks later (a University of Kansas study), and a 1988 study tried colour-coded noun genders against pictures and plain memorising (Nyikos, 1988). Both studies are small, so the evidence is promising but thin.
It helps most when you use it consistently: one colour for el, one for la, on every card and in your notes.
Put the gender in the picture
You can also put the colour into the image you remember the word by. If el words are red, then el arroz (rice) might be a bowl of rice with a red rose in it: “arroz” sounds like “a rose”, and the rose is red because it’s an el word. When you recall the picture, the gender comes with it.
As far as we know, nobody has tested gender colour inside a memory picture. It builds on what makes any memory picture work, which flashcards with pictures goes through.
How Flashfriend does it
Flashfriend colours every Spanish noun by its gender: el words red, la words blue, on the word and in its picture. Nouns always come with their article.
When you make a card, you pick a place for the word’s first sound and a scene from a phrase that sounds like it, and Flashfriend paints it, with the gender’s colour on the thing you’ll remember. Every word has audio, and you’re tested on each word just before you’d forget it. Once you know enough words, you meet your nouns in sentences, where you can see el or la changing the words around them, and grammar arrives one pattern at a time.
Read more about Flashfriend for Spanish, or about the memory techniques behind every card.
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