Masculine and feminine
Arabic · Key Stage 2 · The School
Every noun has a gender
In Arabic every noun is grammatically masculine or feminine, including nouns for objects and ideas. This is GRAMMATICAL gender, not a claim about the thing itself — a table is not female in any real sense, it simply belongs to the feminine group for the purpose of agreement. French, Spanish and German all do the same.
The ending that usually tells you
Most feminine nouns end in ta marbuta, a distinctive rounded letter written only at the end of a word. Spotting it is the fastest way to tell the gender of an unfamiliar noun. There are exceptions worth knowing early — some feminine words have no such ending, including the words for sun, earth, hand and fire — so the ending is a strong clue rather than a law.
Agreement
The gender matters because other words must AGREE with it. An adjective describing a feminine noun takes the feminine form, so a big book and a big city end differently even though big is the same idea. Agreement is what makes an Arabic sentence hold together, and getting it wrong is the most audible early mistake.
مَدْرَسة is feminine, and the ة says so. شَمْس (sun) is feminine with no ة at all. يَد (hand) is feminine too — body parts that come in pairs usually are. Meanwhile خَليفة ends in ة and takes masculine agreement, because it describes men. So the ة is a strong clue and not a rule, and the way you check is the AGREEMENT: شَمْسٌ حارّةٌ, with the feminine adjective.