At first, it seems like all the words ending in -o are masculine, -a means the word is feminine. What are we referring to? The gender variation of each Italian words. But most of these people think about the common fault that is always made by every other Italian student. The truth is, the rest of the European languages that are descendants of the Romance language share the same trait.



Words with gender are common among the Spanish, French and German languages. Even the language of the Portuguese has the same case. This is the good thing, if you have managed to learn even one of the mentioned European languages before, even if you have not mastered it at all, the chance of you being able to understand all the gender rules and grammar basics of the Italian language is going to sink in automatically. The only difference is that unlike the German language, Italian is easier since there are only two selections for gender rules.

So, when you ask yourself again if you can make it through learning the Italian language, the answer is yes. What you just need to keep together is the fact that there are certain exceptions to the rule of the Italian language. Similar to other things, there will always be an exception or two to the rule.

In this case, Italian genders doesn't evolve all the time nor is it based always on the last letter of the word. A word ending in letter -a can still become masculine and -o as feminine. If you aren't certain of this, better to check back on your previous lessons. It doesn't hurt to check back and review the past lessons you've had anyway. For easier basis though, just remember that masculine words which end in -a are those that have been derived from the Greek language. However, words that end in -o just like eco or mano are feminine in gender.

As for the words which end in letter -e, this is a different case and a way to understand all these three is to make sure first that you study the rules that are applied to the words ending in -a and -o and then move on to -e.