Ça marche? Oui, ça marche! Oh là là! C'est ne marche pas... maintenant.

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(Revised 4/18/2016)
I first noticed the expression "Ça march?" in French class at L'Alliance Française de Paris  three years ago.

My French has advanced greatly since then as I continue to keep up my almost daily study of French and live my other side life as well. It's one of those expressions, that once you are aware of it, you wonder why no one made a point of teaching it to you.

My teacher, Lucie, would use a word that sounded like "maa-ch" to me and I would become totally confused. Being a word-for-word "literalist" (a disease that seems to be incurable), I got hung up on the tiniest things people say in French. (Still do.) I was a real "newbie" having only begun to learn French just 6 months before I was in that class and it was overwhelming as to what I didn't know... yet.

For instance, there was a vending machine outside our A.F. classroom door that didn't work. A sign had been hung on it with the words "en panne". Since the machine didn't work, I deduced that "en panne" meant the machine was out of order. Later on, I realized I’d been introduced to that expression before in an earlier class. From early on in my French studies French cars seemed always to be "en panne" in every lesson!

During classes, "C'est ne marche pas!" was said when something didn’t go well. One time, the Smartboard kept losing connection with the Internet and our teacher had to call in the mec who provided computer support. Thank goodness for computer systems support! Or, sometimes the door or furniture would be arranged in an undesirable configuration. “C’est ne marche pas!”

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Marcher doesn’t always just mean to walk or step. Marcher in this context is the word we’d use for “work”. As in, “That doesn’t work!” Why couldn’t I guess that on my own?  I am too literal.


Notez, s'il vous plait: Un mec qui est un type qui est un homme.

Learning and Remembering the Gender of French Words

Is this why ships are "shes"?

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Since I began studying French seriously, I worried about ever memorizing the gender of French nouns. For anyone whose first language is English, this is quite a task. In general, we don’t have to remember what seems like an arbitrary assignment of gender to gender-free items such as telephones and barbeques. (Ships and boats were considered feminine, it's thought to be a left-over in English from borrowed language; most of us ignore this distinction and call a ship, “it”.) I mean, “Who cares?”

Unfortunately for us, lots of languages throw this stumbling block into their grammar. My personal experience with this includes Latin, Spanish, German and now French. And of course, these languages independently label the same words different genders than the other languages.

In French and Spanish, everything is masculine or feminine while in English, Latin and German there are 3 genders including “neuter”. Off the top of my head I remember that the Latin word for river is masculine and the word for island is feminine. The word for maiden, girl or maid in German is mädchen and is neuter! Pour quoi? (I’m half-German ancestrally, so I will not comment on why that might be.)

Now, I have recently found that there is a method to this madness in French. Although there are always the maddening exceptions which one just does have to memorize, consider the following very useful "rules of thumb" or guidelines:

How does a language have no gender at all?**

List of masculine endings on French words:

-age

-eau

-isme

-ment

-phone

-scope

List of feminine endings on French words:

-ance

-ence

-ette

-ode/-ade/ude

-sion

-té

-tion

-ure

My very first French teacher offered that a lot of feminine words end in –e, but you can see from the lists above that that advice really wasn’t all that useful. This list, which I discovered in the workbook, Grammaire Progressive du Française, Nouvelle Édition*, has really made determining the genders of unknown words so much easier for me. Once you can recall the differences between the lists, you will be very much better at reading, writing, and speaking a more-accurately complete French

*The workbook goes on to a very brief list of some common exceptions, but it’s not that valuable because there are many more exceptions than the 12 they list.

 ** Map from  languagesoftheworld.info