1.1 Word Gender and Articles
This is an incomplete sample of one of the lessons in the Beginner course. There are 10 units in total and each unit is divided in 5 to 8 units. Every unit includes audio examples of the words and sentences discussed. The “Practice” section includes videos, audio and text for assisted watching/listening/reading and is aimed at improving comprehension of everyday Portuguese. The course will take you from zero knowledge of the Portuguese language to a moderate level (with adequate effort and commitment).
In Portuguese, all nouns and adjectives are either masculine or feminine. This may be confusing, especially if you’re a native speaker of a language in which words don’t have gender (like English).
Sometimes, the gender of a word is obvious. For example, all of the following words are masculine because the “thing” they refer to is also masculine.
And of course, as you would expect, the following words are feminine because the “thing” they refer to is feminine.
Note: Did you notice the words for “woman” and “wife” are the same in Portuguese? This is just one example of how things work differently in different languages. There will be many other examples. Sometimes, more extreme than this one. But don’t worry. One step at a time.
This gets slightly more complicated when you can’t guess the gender of a word by the gender of what ir refers to. For example:
What gender is a pencil? Or a pen? The Sun? The Moon? In these cases, word gender attribution is random and you will have to remember the gender of each word because other elements of the sentence will depend on it. Like adjectives, the words that qualify nouns.
In these two sentences, the word “amarelo” (yellow) is an adjective. The gender of an adjective depends on the gender of the word it qualifies.
Is there a way to guess the gender of a word in Portuguese?
There is, but you can’t really depend on it. Words that end in O are frequently masculine in Portuguese. Words that end in A are frequently feminine. But there are exceptions and not all Portuguese nouns end in these two vowels.
With time, as your vocabulary increases, you will start to develop an instinct that will allow you to guess the gender of a new word by its ending (when it doesn’t end in O or A), but, for now, the best practice will be to learn every new noun with its respective article. The article is the only sure way of telling what gender a noun is.