Substantiver

Every substantive ist either masculin or femenin. The masculin substantives use the article "el" and the femenin the article "la":

Masculin	Femenin
El coche	La caja

The  are other substantives which can be used in masculin or in femenin:

Masculin	Femenin
El niño	La niña
El gato	La gata
El profesor	La profesora

As an informal rule, we could say that every substantive which ends in "a" is femenin and every substantive which ends in "o" is masculin. There are of course exceptions (el sofa, la moto) but you can normally apply the rule with high probability of sucsess.

The plural

Building the plural from spanish words is very easy because you only have to add "-s" or "-es" to the end of the word depending if it ends with vowel or with consonant. The articles for plural change to "los" for masculin and "las" for femenin:

Singular	Plural
el coche	los coches
la caja	las cajas
el gato	los gatos
el profesor	los profesores
la profesora	las profesoras
el ventilador	los ventiladores
la televisión	los televisiones
la raíz	las raices

The last word (raíz) changed the "z" to "c". Words which end in "z" loose the letter and change it to "c" before the addition of "es".

The undefined article

We use "un" and "una" for the undefined singular substantives and "unos" and "unas" for the undefined plural substantives:

	Singular	Plural
Masculin	un coche	unos coches
	un gato	unos gatos
Femenin	una profesora	unas profesoras
	una caja	unas cajas

Vocabulary used in the examples:

caja - box
coche - car
gato,gata - cat
moto - motorbike
niño - boy
niña - girl
profesor,profesora - teacher
sofa - sofa
television - television
ventilador - ventilator



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