What is grammatical gender?

Sure! Grammatical gender is a way that some languages classify nouns (like people, animals, or objects) as being either masculine, feminine, or neuter. This classification affects how other words in the sentence, like adjectives or articles, change to match the gender of the noun. For example, in Spanish, the word for “table” (mesa) is feminine, so you would use the feminine article “la” (like “la mesa bonita” for “the beautiful table”). In contrast, the word for “book” (libro) is masculine, so you would use the masculine article “el” (like “el libro interesante” for “the interesting book”). An interesting fact is that not all languages have grammatical gender – English, for example, does not use this classification system. In fact, only about a quarter of the world’s languages use grammatical gender! To help you understand better, think of grammatical gender like sorting toys into different boxes – some toys go in the blue box, some in the pink box, and some in the yellow box. Just like how nouns in some languages are sorted into masculine, feminine, or neuter categories!