Grammatical genders
Recently I started learning welsh by myself (Brazilian here, not many options for that, you know?), one thing that is getting me is the grammatical gender of Welsh. So I wanted tips, how to memorize better the genders and how did you who learn do to memorize it?
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Essentially, every time you learn a noun you have to learn the gender and plural with it. The Dysgu Cymraeg course material has them printed on blue and pink backgrounds to help with the gender.
There are some useful shortcuts. All languages are feminine, and all body parts are masculine if you have one of them (nose, mouth, heart) and feminine if you have two of them (lungs, hands, feet). There are two exceptions to this - ceiliau (testicles) are masculine, even though there are two, and chroth (womb) is feminine.
The tip that someone else has given is to learn them with an adjective that mutates.
And finally, there are some words which are considered masculine in some parts of Wales and feminine in others. Tafarn is one example - I learned it was a feminine word, but have subsequently seen ‘real life’ Welsh where it’s ’tafarn mawr’ for a large pub - no mutation.
There are also patterns to some plural. -od for many animals (cathod, siarcod) -oedd for geographical features (ynysoedd, mynyddoedd). Words with dy as a suffix (mutated from tŷ) will always change to dai (e.g, workshops - gwaithdai). And similarly words that are formed taking ‘fa as a suffix (e.g., derbynfa for a reception or literally a receiving place) will use -feydd as the plural suffix. Equally there’s hundreds of irregular versions - cwn is the plural of ci, and dwylo is the plural of llaw. The last one kind of makes sense - two hands is dwy law in Welsh, so it’s not that much of a stretch.