1.1 – The Basics
What is a noun?
In Spanish, nouns take BOTH gender and number when referring to the elements they name.
In the case of gender, nouns, do not denote male or female attributes. The gender that they assume is just a grammatical feature. So things, people and ideas can be masculine or feminine, singular or plural.
One of the most important elements to understand and effortlessly apply when reading, listening, or speaking Spanish is the Gender and number of not only the Articles, but also the Nouns and the Adjectives that are used to modify them.
Let’s illustrate this concept for a better comprehension by applying the Spanish rule to this English Sentence:
The white horses are eating in the pasture
LOS caballos blancos están comiendo en el potrero
The horses white are eating in the pasture
The very first thing you notice is that in Spanish the ADJECTIVE precedes the NOUN, whereas in English it is the opposite. So “Caballos” comes first and the adjective “blancos” comes after that.
And, as stated earlier, you will notice that the article is expressed as the Plural Masculine LOS, the noun horse is expressed in the plural, and the adjective “blanco” is also expressed as the masculine plural “BLANCOS”.
Let’s move forward and look at the following pages for further illustration.
