Learning about Gender and Indefinite Articles in Italian
Gender of the Italian Noun
In Italian all nouns have gender. Some seem logical like donna (woman) which is feminine. Others don't seem to have any logical assignment such as montagna (mountain) which is feminine. That's because it really doesn't have to do with the object as much as it does the grammatical assignment of a word to a specific category. My advice is to spend less time trying to figure out why something is classified masculine or feminine and spend more time studying how to tell if a word is masculine or feminine and what that means when it comes to how that affects using it in a sentence.Determining the gender of an Italian noun
This is by no means an exhaustive explanation of noun gender. It is adequate to get us started and we want to keep things as simple as possible to keep us moving along. At this point we will only address singular nouns. We will learn more about noun gender as we move on.Nouns ending in "o" are predominately masculine (esempio - "bambino")
Nouns ending in "a" are predominately feminine (esempio - "bambina")
Nouns ending in "e" can be masculine or feminine
Most nouns taken from other languages are predominately masculine.
One note regarding nouns ending in "e" is;
Nouns ending with “ore” (dottore, fiore) are masculine
Nouns ending with “ione” (stazione, lezione) are usually feminine.
The Italian Indefinite Article
The indefinite articles in Italian are the equivalent of the English words "a" and "an" that we use for phrases like "I'll have an apple" or "I need a car". The indefinite articles must agree in gender with the nouns they are used with. In other words, you have to use a masculine indefinite article with a masculine noun and so on.Criteria for choosing which Indefinite Articles used in the Italian
| Indefinite Article | Gender | Special considerations |
| Un | Masculine | |
| Uno | Masculine | Nouns starting with Z or S + a consonant |
| Una | Feminine | |
| Un’ | Feminine | Nouns starting with a vowel |
You never use an indefinite article in the plural
* Although greatly simplified I learned this information from the Book “Ciao!” by Carla Federici and Carla Larese Riga, Copyright 1986 –and from the Drive Time Italian Audio Course, Copyright 2005
