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La Casa vs El hospital. What determines the gender of each? Spelling is great, but this piece boggles the mind.
In Spanish, most masculine words are "LONERS", and end with one of those letters.
Suffix -a mostly female, Suffix -al mostly male. There are exceptions but it's a good rule of thumb.
And then you get - el agua
Feminine. With feminine adjectives. El agua clara. But you have to use "El".
Spanish is still way more consistent than English tho
Yeah like I said mostly haha. ^^ Same with el problema, etc. There's probably a nice ethymological explanation to memorize them better but in the end you have to deal with irregularities in any language except maybe Esperanto or some other artificial ones.
I’m sure there’s etymological reasons, but in practice ‘la hospital’ being less pleasant to say (with two vowel sounds directly next to each other) probably contributed. Like how it’s el agua, even though any adjectives for it are feminine: el agua contaminada.