Grammatical gender is any way that a language places its nouns into different categories. In many European languages, these categories are named after genders, but they aren’t like that in every language, and it is sometimes called noun class instead in those instances. It’s important that when there is grammatical gender, other words in the phrase change to match the category of the noun.
In Spanish, “la mesa” (the table) is a “feminine” noun, so the determiner “la” is used instead of “el” which would be masculine. Adjectives must agree with the gender of the noun, so if you were to describe a table as red, you would say “la mesa roja,” not “la mesa rojo,” the form you would use if you were to describe a “masculine” noun as red, like “el cielo rojo” (the red sky). In Danish, the masculine and feminine grammatical genders have collapsed into the “common” gender, so now there are two grammatical genders in Danish: common and neuter. Grammatical gender does not really correspond to human gender.
