Once again, learning Spanish nouns can be made easier because of the many similarities between names for items in English and Spanish.  If you have some understanding of Latin roots, your task of learning Spanish is made even easier. 

 

Some similar English/Spanish pairings include invitación/invitation, insecto/insect, clase/class, and profesor/professor (teacher).  Generally an English word which ends in -tion, or -sion, will be very similar in the Spanish language as atención/attention, ocasión/occasion, información/information, and excavación/excavation.  Words such as politician and musician come over to English as político and músico consecutively.  It is interesting to note how many similarities between words in Spanish and roots or synonyms of words in English.  A good example is the Spanish word 'pensativo' which means thoughtful in adverb form.  The verb pensar means 'to imagine' or 'to consider'.  Consider though, the English word 'pensive' also meaning thoughtfully considering something.

 

Keep in mind that the varying pronunciation (pronunciación) in English and Spanish would be so different that the English speaker would probably not recognize the word given the Spanish pronunciation.

 

This is reflected in one other important point about the correct pronunciation when you are learning Spanish:  The pronunciation of each letter in the written word carries equal weight with every other letter.  This means that each single vowel is always pronounced in the same way no matter what position it appears in. For example, instead of the English pro-nun-see-A-shun, in Spanish the word would be pronounced: pro-noon-see-ah-see-OWN. 

 

In English vowel pairings are painful to learn for a native Spanish speaker.  For example, consider the words: thou, thorough, thought, through,tough.  In English, the 'ou' is pronounced differently  in each instance. The non-native speaker trying to learn English will often find this concept very frustrating, since essentially each variation has to be memorized.  In Spanish the same two letters would ALWAYS be pronounced "oh oo".

 

This causes Spanish to sound very rapid to the untrained ear since every syllable is given equal evidence and weight under this system.

 

One feature of learning Spanish which is very different from anything in English is that of masculine and feminine endings to nouns.  Nouns which end in -o are usually masculine.  Nouns that end in -a are usually feminine, as are nouns which end in -dad, -ion, -tud- and -tad.  Any exceptions to these rules have to be memorized individually.  The gender of the noun is matched by either a masculine article  'el' as in 'el libro' or a feminine article 'la' as in 'la casa'.

 

The articles are pluralized if masculine by the use of 'los' and if feminine, by 'las'.  To make a noun go from singular to plural you add 's' to words ending in a vowel and 'es' to words ending in a consonant.

 

In almost every case, the definite articles must agree in both number and gender with the noun it modifies.  So, you have el libro, the book; los libros, the books; la casa, the house; and las casas, the houses