Italian Course Beginner Series Lesson 6: Gender & Number Video Lecture | Learn Italian Language: For Beginners and Travellers

hello my name is Claudio and today I
will teach you
gender and number in Italian now as you
may already know if you don't know I'm
going to tell you right now in Italian
words have gender but when I say words I
mean nouns and adjectives so this is
what gender is basically words are
either masculine or feminine and number
means that words are either plural or
singular like in English so you do have
number in English but you don't have
gender now this is all you have to take
away from this video this is the most
important thing in this video it's a
table where you can find all the endings
and their corresponding case so
masculine singular K's feminine singular
masculine plural feminine plural and
basically all words follow these rules
okay apart from the words that don't
know seriously there are exceptions but
we are not going to care for exceptions
right now we care about the rules and
the rule is that if the word end in O is
masculine so let's have a look at the
sentence that we've been looking at for
quite a while the babies are eating a
giraffe eat Nia naughty man genno una
jirafa so basically here we have two
nouns and one verb so we have a subject
the baby's the action the verb the
action word our eating man general and
the object it's Raph or not G Rafa so
because we have different number meaning
we have a plural subject and the
singular object we have different
endings and we also have different
genders anyway
this is a dictionary so this is what you
would find in an Italian dictionary an
Italian dictionary you would find the
word neonate o and G Rafa and the reason
why you find neonate oh and not neon at
tea is because you will never find the
plural version of a word in the
dictionary so you will never find cats
but you will find cat in an English
dictionary it works the same way in
Italian so basically reading this
sentence we see that the noun ends in I
near Nattie so we know that is plural
and masculine so we know that we have
two that we are dealing with babies and
not one single baby the article behaves
accordingly so basically the article and
the search articles and adjectives go
together with the noun and we will have
a look at adjectives and articles later
on but basically this article would be
different if the word was feminine or if
it was singular here we have a word that
ends in a so we know that is singular
and therefore we also have an article
that ends in a because of the noun that
it refers to so this is really it gender
is not very difficult to understand but
it's difficult to get used to it so you
will have to practice a bit you will
have to try and remember this this
little table
try and um try and practice it and of
course the very very big difference
between the Italian language and the
English language derives from this from
the fact that you don't have gender in
English so if we take the son of the
moon as examples of just normal words
the ending doesn't really say much they
both end in n for instance in this case
and that doesn't tell us anything
nothing in particular
so we could say although in are
completely correct we could say that
especially when talking about long words
in English the pronunciation of the very
beginning of the word is more important
than the end so if you want to be lazy
you better be lazy towards the end of
the word rather than towards the
beginning in Italian you can't afford
that because the ending is as important
as the beginning of the word if not more
important
so although Italian words tend to be
longer than in English and the
pronunciation in Italian is a lot easier
you're going to have to pronounce
everything quicker but you can't rush
the very end of the word I know it
doesn't make sense right now but you'll
get used to pronouncing the end of the
words properly in Italian so when you
say jeera fuh
you cannot say gee Rafa I'm going to
have to pronounce it in its entirety ok
guys so this is it for me for today I
hope you've enjoyed the video I will see
you in the next one until then take care