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