Spanish Nouns

In your English class you probably heard the teacher say that "nouns are words which represent persons, places, and things". This is true, but it isn't really a complete idea of what nouns are. Nouns can also represent events, feelings, activities, and many more ideas. The main thing that you should remember is that a noun is something that you can talk about. You can tell what it does, what it looks like, if you like it, and more. Usually you can use the word "the" with a noun, but not always. Nouns are the words which we use as SUBJECTS of verbs. The noun tells who or what is doing something, and the verb tells what it is doing. For example, in the sentence, "The boy reads", boy is the noun and tells who is doing something, and "reads" is the verb, telling us what the boy is doing.

In English we divide nouns into two groups. Let's see if you can figure out how we determine which group the nouns belong in. Look at the following two lists.

Group 1 Group 2
apple cat
orange dog
olive worm
Can you see how this process works? At first you might be tempted to say that the first group is fruit, and the second group is animals. That doesn't really help us much, though, because there are a lot of nouns that are something else. "House" wouldn't fit into either group, if the meaning of the word was what determined its placement in the group. Which group do you think that the word "house" belongs in? In fact, it should be in group 2. You be saying that this doesn't make any sense, but I'm going to show you that it does. Once you see the logic behind the system of nouns in English, it will make sense to you. Here's a hint. Try putting the words "a" and "an" in front of the nouns in the two groups.

Notice that with the words in the first group, you can say "an", such as "an apple", "an orange", "an olive" and it sounds right. If you put "a" in front of these nouns, it does not sound right. On the other hand, if you use "a" with the nouns in group 2, it does sound right. You may have noticed that the nouns in group 1 begin with vowels, and the nouns in group 2 begin with consonants. In English we divide nouns into two categories by looking at the first part of the word, and placing the ones that begin with vowels in one group, and the ones that begin with consonants in the other group.

Now let's look at Spanish nouns. In Spanish we also have two groups that we must place the nouns in. Here are some examples:

Group 1 Group 2
manzana gato
naranja perro
aceituna gusano
These are Spanish translations of the same words that we used in the English lists. Once again, however, you can't trust the meaning of the word to tell you which category the words belong in. If I added the word "snake" which in Spanish is "culebra", it would not go with the other animals in group 2. It would be placed in group 1. Look carefully at the words in both groups and try to see what all the words in group 1 have in common, then determine what the words in group 2 have in common. Did you notice that all of the words in group 1 end in the letter "a", while all of the words in group 2 end in the letter "o"? That's the clue. We could say that in English we have the "V" group and the "C" group (nouns that begin with vowels and nouns that begin with consonants. In Spanish we have the "A" group and the "O" group (nouns that END with "a" and nouns that END with "o"). This distinction will be very important because when we use nouns in sentences, other words will have to match, according to the group that the noun belongs to.