The biggest difference between the English and Spanish languages is that Spanish gives lots of its words a gender, what that means is that the spelling of a word will be affected by what or who that word is referring to. If that sounds a little bit odd and not an easy Spanish lesson at all, let us look at a few examples.
A Spanish word for doctor is medico, medico signifies a male doctor. If you wanted to write about a female doctor you could use the word medica.
If you are reading Spanish and come across medica, you know it is referring to a female doctor, medico a male doctor. A word will end in O if its describing a male and an A for a female, easy!
Gender affects what words are used before the object of the sentence as well, this will become clearer if we use an example. Medico, means male doctor, to say “the male doctor” we could say “el medico”, to say “the female doctor” we could say “la medica”, so “el” is used to say “the” for a male and “la” is used to say “the” for a female.
I hope you still think this is an easy Spanish lesson because there are a couple more thing to consider.
We have seen that “la medica” is “the female” doctor, but the gender rule applies if we want to say “A female doctor”, this we could say using “UNA medica”. So if we want to say “A male doctor” we could use “UN medico”.
Lastly there is one more thing to consider. When we are looking at a group we need to know how gender affects the words used in a sentence to describe that group. In English we say “the doctors” regardless of the gender of the doctors in that group, but it is not that simple in Spanish. More than one female doctor could be called “las medicas”.More than one male doctor could be called “los medicos”.
The complication arises if you have more than one person to talk or write about but the group is made up of men and women, if that is the case you always use the masculine option, so a group of doctors made up of men and women will be “los medicos”, even if there are fifty women and one man!
I hope you found that an easy Spanish lesson and that it will be the start of a larger appreciation of the Spanish language. It is essential when learning Spanish that you apply the correct gender to the words used in your sentences, you wouldn’t to cause any offense?
