Because it matters! And there are quite a few Spanish nouns which are exceptions to the -o male and -a female rules, plus there are still more which don't end -a or -o and which don't fit all the other arbitrary and very forgettable other rules which all the grammar books list.
So what do you do ?
As a neat sort of coincidence, there was a fascinating program on R4 this morning about word games, and one of the games was to try putting "Mr." or "Mrs" in front of all your nouns.
It proved remarkably tricky for an English speaker... because it's not at all obvious which it should be for most nouns.
However, as Mr. Fry ( for it was he) pointed out, to speakers of gender-nouned languages this thought is absolutely natural, and gives each noun an extra quality, or shade of meaning, almost in the same way that some people assign colours to nouns.
They went on to discuss how this might/does affect, for example, poetry where ( for example) Baudelaire is known to have used the gender-properties of the nouns he used to emphasise the meaning/symbolism in his poetry.
I have often wondered how native speakers of such languages manage to learn and remember the gender of obscure nouns that they rarely use. Some books tell us that native speakers develop a "feel" for the correct gender.
Personally I doubt this....but in another bizarre coincidence , in that same programme they played another game which touched on this idea of innate "feel."
They called it " Cheese or Font." Players were given a word and had to decide whether it was a cheese or a font! It was not a test of their knowledge... they were meant to do this by "feeling" which was right for a cheese-name, and which was right for a "font-name."
For example, one of the words was "dauphin". After a fair bit of thinking, one decided it was a cheese, the other decided it was a font... in fact this one was both.
[I've just found out that you can play this game online.. just type Cheese or Font into google! ]
It would be interesting to try this on native speakers where they had to decide on the gender of the obscure noun to see how well they did.
There were plenty of other interesting ideas in that program which I will bring up sooner or later.
Anyway, one way of remembering the gender for any noun is to make a mental picture of the noun with either a man or a woman.
An example would be thimble,,,, el dedal in Spanish...but inconvenently masculine so the the obvious woman-thimble link is no good.
You could simply remember that it comes from el dedo = finger.
Or, for example, you could picture Wayne Rooney running round the pitch almost totally covered with a giant thimble.
Or Jeremy Clarkson having trouble changing gear because all ten fingers have thimbles on them...
Let's try another... how about the mink... el visón.. again masculine.
Imagine something really incongruous like Vin Diesel strolling down the road wearing a mink coat.
How about el afán ... ambition/effort... this type is trickier because this is not an actual object... it's again masculine so you can picture thet survivalist Ray Mears making an immense effort to build a fan to keep cool in the desert!
You desperately need to remember that a Partridge... la perdiz... is feminine!
Well, you could simply think of a woman seaching for her lost Partridge( to lose = perder) all over the place...
Or think of all the women in the Partridge Family ( remember them). That'll do!
You get the general idea I'm sure. Remember to make your images strange, weird, rude,scary or whatever so they sink in.
Well, it's music time, and I thought we could have a look at more by that nice Zahara who was with Santi Balmas
....this is she playing live... a lovely, intimate version of En la Habitación... a feminine noun there, obeying the -iôn usually feminine rule!
There's lots of versions of this lovely quiet song to watch...
That is just beautiful! Great audience too.
Thanks to the musicstar site for these words..
Video y Letra de la Cancion En La Habitación – Zahara
Fumo sola en la terraza del hotel
recuerdo el humo
y la cerveza en tus manos.
Anoche las niñas paseaban sus zapatos
y no teníamos nada que perder.
No teníamos nada…
En este cuarto hay demasiado por hacer
y no tengo a nadie con quien echar un rato.
Todos queríamos ser extraordinarios
Podrías hacer algo por volver
podrías hacer algo…
El tiempo en esta habitación me sabe a vino
dedico demasiado a imaginar que estas conmigo
apuro la copa de un trago
dejo el cuerpo en el pasillo
Hoy todo lo demás es lo de menos
Hoy todo lo demás…
Yo confiaba que subieras a mi habitación
y no que te marcharas como hiciste
Las escaleras son interminables
si no hay quien te espere después
si no hay quien te espere…
No hay manera de que vuelve ese miércoles
tengo la sal entre los ojos mojados
Quiero que sepas que eres el culpable
de que hoy me sienta extrañamente bien
de que hoy me sienta extraña…
El tiempo en esta habitación me sabe a vino
dedico demasiado a imaginar que estas conmigo
apuro la copa de un trago
dejo el cuerpo en el pasillo
Hoy todo lo demás es lo de menos
Hoy todo lo demás…
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Fuente: MusicstarX.Net
I can't forget that ridiculous image of Wayne bloody Rooney covered with a giant thimble! Good!
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