Palabras Engañosas Self Check

In this unit, we are not going to learn more cognates. We are going to learn about another group of words in Spanish that sometimes confuse students in terms of gender.

Do you sometimes have difficulty remembering whether a word is masculine or feminine? In some cases, it is really easy to "guess," right? If the word ends in "-o" it is generally masculine....if it ends in "-a", it is generally feminine. But what about those that don't fall into those two categories...?

• Words that are abbreviated in Spanish may appear to be one gender when really they are a different gender.

  la foto(grafía)
  la moto(cicleta)

• Words that end in -pa, -ta or -ma are generally masculine, even though they end in "-a." These words are words that Spanish borrowed from the Greek language and they kept their original genders.

  el mapa
  el sistema
  el problema
  el clima
  el drama
  

• There are also irregular words that must be memorized. You have had a few of these:

  la mano
  el día

• Some feminine words that start with "a" or "ha" that have emphasis on the first syllable use "el" in the singular but their adjectives and plural forms take the feminine form.  For example, water is el agua but its plural is las aguas.  Take a look at this example:

  El agua está fría.
  El arte italiana es mi favorita

Escribe el artículo (el, la, los, las) frente al sustantivo en español y haz clic en el sustantivo para ver si tienes razón.