Essential Tips on Learning French Grammar for English Speakers

He or She? We Must Agree

When you name a table, a chair or a house in English, you don’t need to worry about its gender;
however in French, every noun has a gender, and you need to know it.

This is one of the tricky parts of French grammar, because the idea doesn’t really exist in
English. The gender of a noun will change the ending of the words referring to it–this is called
“agreement.”

The difficulty is that many of the words in a sentence must agree. This doesn’t mean they sit
down to talk about it–just that their endings mark them as the same gender as the noun of the
sentence. For example, the French for “a good-looking woman” is une belle femme.

But to say “a good-looking man,” we would say un bel homme. Femme is a feminine word (easy
to remember), and that means the article (une = the) has a feminine ending, while the masculine
word, homme, has a masculine article (un = the). It also affects the
adjective, beau/bel/belle (meaning beautiful or good-looking), and you need to use the form that
matches the noun you’re describing.

So, when learning French vocab, it’s super important that you learn not just the word, but its
gender!

There are many tricks for learning the gender, so try a few to find out what works best for you. If
you tend to be a list learner, a handy trick is to memorize the patterns of endings that are
typically one gender or the other. For example, the nouns with these endings are typically
feminine:
· a vowel then a consonant then “e,” like: -ine, -ise, -alle, -elle, -esse, -ette, -euse, -ance and
-ence;
· -tion, -sion, -son;
· -ure, -ude, -ade;
· -ée, -té, -ière.
and masculine nouns mostly end with:
· -ste and -tre;
· -u, -ou, -oir;
· -me, -ment, -isme;
· -ble and -cle;
· -eau and -eur;
· -age and -ege;
· And many of them end in consonants: -b, -c, -d, -f, -k, -l, -m, -n, -p, -r, -s, -t, -x.
Remember that there are always exceptions that you’ll have to learn specifically, but this pattern
is a useful rule of thumb.
Another good way to learn the gender of new words is to learn sentences that suggest the gender
to you, or by linking words of the same gender and learning them together, such as l‘homme
aime son vélo vert (the man loves his green bike) or la femme aime la forêt
et ses belles fleurs (the woman loves the forest and its beautiful flowers).
In a similar vein, when learning thematic vocabulary lists, break up words into one list of
masculine words and one list of feminine words. For example, when learning foods, you might
have, le pain (bread) and le fromage (cheese) in one list and la pomme (apple) and la
carotte (carrot) in another.

Try to create mental images of these things that you can recall later: for bread and cheese,
conjure up an image of dipping bread in cheese fondue; for apples and carrots, you might
imagine a snack platter. As with the above strategy, this exercise gets you actively thinking about
gender and making connections between the words you are learning. If you catch yourself
wondering if fromage is masculine or feminine later on, you just have to remember which mental
image you associated the word with!