Grammatical gender

You know how we call some things "he" and some things "she"? Like a boy is a "he" and a girl is a "she"? Well, some languages do that too, but for everything - not just people. In those languages, things like books or chairs or trees have a gender, just like people do. But in these languages, they use words like "masculine" or "feminine" or "neutral" to describe them, instead of "he" or "she".

So, let's say you're speaking one of these languages, and you want to talk about a book. The word for book might be masculine, so you would use masculine words to talk about it, like "he" or "him" - even though a book doesn't have a gender in real life. But if you were talking about a chair, and the word for chair was feminine, you would use words like "she" or "her" to talk about it.

It can be a little bit confusing, especially if you're used to speaking a language that doesn't have grammatical gender. But it's just another way that languages are different from each other!