Gender

Nouns in Slovak, as in other languages, exhibit "grammatical gender:" Masculine, Feminine and Neuter. However, unlike English, all inanimate nouns have gender. So, yes, a table can be "masculine," a book can be "feminine," and a car can be "neuter." There is absolutely no logic to this. If this is the first time you've heard about this, don't worry. Don't think about it too much, and just learn the patterns. Think about it as a classification system.

Animacy

One other thing you have to learn from day one, unfortunately, is whether a noun is animate or not. However, this is actually logical. And it only concerns masculine nouns. So this aspect has just been made twice as easy. Only masculine nouns have any distinction when it comes to animacy, and logically, nouns that refer to animate things, living things, things that are alive, (also dead things that were once alive), fall into the animate category. All others pattern like the inanimate nouns.

Let's look at some examples.

Identifying the Gender of a Noun

To identify the gender of a noun, the first thing to do is look at the last letter or two. In the list above, you should notice that all of the masculines end in a consonant, all of the feminines end in -a, and all of the neuters end in a vowel. However, the above list is somewhat contrived, and we will now take a look at these patterns, and learn their exceptions.

Masculines

Generally, masculine nouns end in a consonant. This should be your first guess when encountering a new word. However, a subset of masculine animate nouns ends in -a. "Wait, What? You just said feminines end in -a." Well, I'm telling you now that some masculines end in -a. Don't worry, for these words, it should be obvious they are masculine, because they denote traditionally male people. Here are some examples:

Wait, so in Slovak, only men are heros and soccer players? No. There are feminine forms which correspond to these masculine forms:

Feminines

As we have seen above, feminines often end in -a. In fact, more often than not (excluding the exceptions noted here), a noun that ends in an -a will be feminine. Here are some more examples: