Languages and Linguistics

Like he said, there are a lot of exceptions. He may be seeing something that isn't there. Especially since two of the most common words for penis are feminine - la pene, la verga.

Then you have words like la mano, la foto - the hand, the photo. Feminine but ends with o. A lot of words that end with ma are masculine as well. El sistema, el programa. I remember an early Spanish class in college when the professor introduced the phrase - Quiero ir de compras (I want to go shopping). A lot of us asked why it wasn't Quiero ir de comprar. Comprar being the infinitive of buy, which we thought made more sense. "Tradition," he said, smiling. There are rules, but there's always going to be something that doesn't follow it.

Unless I missed something waaaay back in high school, I don't think there's any way to figure out whether a word in English (or one's native language) that you don't know in Spanish will be masculine or feminine once you learn it.

Even worse - not all languages agree on the gender of things. Una manzana, ein Apfel. An apple in Spanish (feminine) and German (masculine).