Gender of Nouns in Portuguese

Introduction

All Portuguese nouns are either masculine (m) or feminine (f). Generally, masculine nouns denote male human beings and animals and feminine nouns denote female human beings and animals. However, this doesn't help much when attempting to identify the gender nouns of inanimate, non-human or non-animal things. In such cases, "you just have to know." Most often, this means memorizing the gender of a particular noun.

There are, however, some clues that can be of great help in identifying the gender of some nouns. You can often determine the gender of a noun by the noun's ending or by the noun's meaning. Also, because many nouns have both masculine and feminine forms, you may also change the gender of many nouns by simply changing the ending.

Task

Now it's time to work on gender of nouns. In this webquest, you'll learn to identify some "rules" or tips to know whether a noun is masculine or feminine

Process

A noun is a part of speech that describes a thing, person, place, event, concept or other substance or entity. Nouns in Portuguese are either masculine or feminine; the neuter, or genderless noun, has died out. In a great number of cases, it is usually possible to tell the gender of the noun from its ending. There are also other groups of nouns which take an invariable masculine or feminine form, but may refer to persons or other entities of either gender.

You are going to visit some websites and learn some rules. Make notes. Discuss your findings with your colleagues . Then, summarise what you have learned. Write a summary of the rules for gender in a WORD document.  This should be well organised, possibly in a table or using proper headings, separate masculine and feminine nouns. Provide examples and exceptions to the rules, if any.

You are going to upload your finished work onto a shared folder on the Google Drive. You will use the link provided in Blackboard.

 

Tip: Always learn nouns with their articles. Include the articles along with the nouns on your vocabulary lists so you can memorize them together.

 

 

Evaluation

Conclusion

Learning the gender of nouns is very important because the noun classes form an agreement system with another aspect of the language, such as adjectives, articles, pronouns, or verbs, therefore you should be fastidious about getting the genders right. I draw explicit attention to the gender of the nouns that we learn in class. I usually write the masculine nouns in blue, and the feminine ones in red.  If you are a visual learner, you should take advantage of the use of colours to help you memorise what nouns are masculine and feminine.

After this project, pay attention to the clues you have to look for to work out the genders (the beauty of Portuguese!). Also, enjoy making observations about gender when you are learning new words. Hopefully because you are getting it embedded in this work, your first semester of Portuguese, it should become second nature to you later.

Um abraço

Credits