Adjective agreement for unusual nouns

[creepa.livejournal.com]

I'm going over some grammar points, and came across something I'm unsure of. I'll try to explain it as best I can, but I think ultimately I may have the wrong end of the stick.

The small group of nouns causing trouble are those that are masculine but end in -а or -я, such as дядя and дедушка. I understand that despite their misleading endings, these such words are masculine due to their real-world connotation. The problem lies when applying an adjective to these words. Does the adjective take masculine endings, because the noun is masculine? Or does the adjective take a feminine ending to "match" with the noun ending? Instinct tells me it's the former, meaning that the context of the sentence is extremely important to understand the overall meaning. For example, if the tricky noun+adjective is in the accusative, and the adjective takes a masculine ending, this would seem strange to me as a beginner of Russian, and if I didn't realise that the noun was an exception, I'd think there was a mistake in the sentence.

Does this make sense? I'm confusing myself the more I write about it!

EDIT: problem solved already! Thanks for the quick responses. :)

Comments

[taosu.livejournal.com]

Masculine adjectives correspond to masculine nouns whatever thir endings may be. "Мой дедушка" is correct and "моя дедушка" is wrong.

[irishotel.livejournal.com]

right

[gera.livejournal.com]

The former (masculine).

[oryx_and_crake]

To make things somewhat easier, just don't think of words ending in -a, -я as of "feminine type of words". They just belong to the first declension. So, they can be either feminine or masculine.

To confuse you further, there are nouns (not much, luckily) whose adjectives can take either masculine or feminine endings, depending on the gender of the person they relate to, e.g.
Маша - такая забияка! (Mary is so aggressive!)
Петя - такой забияка! (Peter is so aggressive!)
Маша - такая ябеда! (Mary is such a snitch!)
Петя - такой ябеда! (Peter is such a snitch!)

[noser.livejournal.com]

By the way, how many of the 1st declension masculine words are inanimate? Textbooks usually give домина as an example, but I can hardly think of anything else...