Grammatical gender is an 'inherent' characteristics of a Russian noun. Each noun (including non-animated ones!) can be either masculine, feminine, or neuter. Most feminine words end with -а or -я, most masculine ones - with a hard consonant or -й, most neuter ones -with -e or -o (sometimes also -и, like "такси"). Nouns which end with -ь can be masculine or feminine (you can always look up on Wiktionary, you can use the English version and search for words written in cyrillic).
In addition, each countable noun, regardless of its gender, can be either singular or plural. If a singular noun ends with a hard consonant (by the way, what gender is it? :)), its plural counterpart will end with -ы (in most cases, like документ - документы), and sometimes with -a (паспорт - паспорта, доктор - доктора). There are some exceptions one need to remember here: брат - братья, сон - сны etc. If a singular maculine noun ends with -ь or -й, you need to change the last letter to -и to get the plural (the exceptions are день - дни and some others). The last letter in feminine nouns (-a or -я) is normally changed to -и or -ы (-я always changes to -и). The ending -o in will most likely change to -a (there are some exceptions, though: дерево - деревья, яблоко - яблоки), while -e normally changes to -я to form plural nouns. There are some nouns which are always plural: ножницы, очки; the word деньги is always used in its plural form.
What do we need this for? In short, we normally use different forms of verbs and adjectives depending on the gender and number of a noun the verbs and adjectives are related to (I will not touch upon the third noun characteristics, the case, in this post). We also choose different possessive pronouns depending on those. You may find all the possessive pronouns (in the nominative case) in the table below (it's clickable).
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