The Gender Of French Nouns

Learn the French grammar with this easy French textbook full of examples and exercises! This course is divided into 7 chapters and includes 200 exercises and free video lessons for each point. The method is simple: start from a simple sentence and add slowly more elements to it. Then practice after each new element with one or more exercises.

Do you wonder why an arm is masculine while a leg is feminine? Why your sofa is masculine but your chair is feminine? And why should a person or victim always be feminine, even if the person or victim you're talking about happens to be a man? And isn't it odd that masculinit is feminine? The illogic of French gender can be very frustrating. But after reading this book, if you see words like croisement, pays, vin, or chocolat, you will instantly know they are masculine, and you will also immediately recognize that words like ville, facture, maladie, and essence are feminine.

A practical manual designed to help students of French to conquer the problem of genders. The author simplifies the task by divining words into lexical categories, simple versus complex nouns and day-to-day versus learned vocabulary. The activities aim to facilitate learning by encouraging the use of adjectives and structures which mark genders clearly.

"People nouns" (about 1500) are either optional-sex (un enfant, une enfant) or one-sex oriented (un frère, une soeur). To determine gender, in these two instances only, endings do not matter. Sex matters. Sex determines gender. "Optionals" are listed phonetically in contextual blocks and defined. One-sex nouns are introduced phonetically in context where appropriate throughout. To determine the gender of all other French nouns, noun endings must be considered. Sorting out the mute e-ending nouns is the main gender problem. All of these nouns may be sorted out by means of the "two basic rules" when exceptions are noted.These two rules determine the gender of 90% of the 33,000 nouns in a comprehensive French dictionary. The remaining 10% are "exceptions" to the "two basic rules" and are listed phonetically in rule order in contextual blocks and defined. Homonyms (about 250), which are derived from all lists, are alphabetically listed in pairs. Homonyms demand proper gender to establish meaning (un tour, a tour, une tour, a tower). Exact cognates (about 7000) are separately listed in alphabetical order. All About French Nouns: Focus on Gender confronts the French gender problem and defines it in the most concise manner possible. It provides a permanent source of reference and perhaps the only comprehensive documentary evidence on the subject available today. As such, it serves to confirm or deny previous notions about French gender.

French nouns are either feminine or masculine. French-speaking children have no problems learning the genders associated with nouns since they grow up learning the language as their parents speak with themselves or with their children. In other words, they learn what they hear naturally exactly as other children do in every other part of the world. For a person learning French as a second language, however, it is without any doubt a different story especially if his or her native language does not assign genders to nouns. The present book has been designed to provide a helpful approach to learning genders assigned to nouns. The book is divided into two main divisions. The first division informs the reader of feminine nouns while the second touches upon the masculine nouns. It is imperative to note that a list of nouns with identical genders is classified or grouped. The reason for this classification or grouping of the nouns is that by learning the gender of a noun in one group, the learner will automatically remember the gender for the remaining nouns in the same group. For example, when talking about time, the nouns hour, minute, and second are all feminine, thereby finding themselves in a group for the hour divisions. The author has provided a long list for some nouns and a shorter list for others. In either case, the idea is to understand how far a given group stretches as well as how beneficial the pairing of a given group to a gender can become. Lastly, the definition of nouns is not provided since an enormous number of nouns have identical spelling and meaning as their English equivalents. Also, by looking up the words, mastery of the language becomes more possible and enjoyable.

An indispensable reference for students of French, this book provides a comprehensive guide to the gender of French nouns. With detailed explanations and numerous examples, it is an essential tool for anyone learning the language. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.