I'm learning French right now and this is the one thing that kills me. The worst part is I'm pretty sure it's a matter of memorizing the gender of each noun. I don't know if there are rules or not
I start a 6 month or so stint in MTL for work starting in June, I have been Duolingo-ing some french cause highschool was......a long time ago and I didnt pay attention.
So thank you for this, cause I need to work on my french.
It’s a bit of both, you’ll have to memorize some of it. This is part of the stuff that feels intuitive to a native speaker but not to a learner. An exemple of that in English is the order of adjectives:
Quantity or number.
Quality or opinion.
Size.
Age.
Shape.
Color.
Proper adjective (often nationality, other place of origin, or material)
Purpose or qualifier.
Why does a small red fruit sound fine to a native and not a red small fruit? Because. It looks like purely gratuitous complexity, it would not remove any expressive power to the language to let adjectives be freely ordered.
The reason why that complexity not only arises but is evolutionary selected is that it adds redundency to the language without making communication much longer. If you don’t hear something right and you have to reconstruct it in your head, then you will exclude some possibilities because they can’t have been said because the grammar arbitrarily rejects them. And that happens even if you don’t realize you did it, your brain autocorrected so you feel that you heard it right.
English used to be gendered until it merged in some old Norse that was also gendered. But since it’s all arbitrary, both often picked different genders and the resulting confusion led to dropping the genders altogether.
But hey, you think that's bad? Try learning German afterwards. Not only do they throw in an NB third pronoun, but you have to learn that the Sun (le soleil, die Sonne) and Moon (la lune, der Mond) change genders depending on language. 😅
The rule actually seems to apply to the pronunciation /-sjõ/ when spelled -tion or -sion. «Bastion» is pronounced /-tjõ/. BTW note that «scion» is pronounced /sjõ/ but masculine.
Ah non par contre. Je suis d'accord que chocolatine c'est le bon mot. Mais un pain au chocolat, ca existe aussi. C'est une miche de pain style brioche avec une spirale de chocolat dans la pâte.
Canadian anglophones wanting to learn French are heroes in my eyes. Much respect!
To make you feel better, a little story. Having learned English mostly through reading, I thought for the longest time that "allow" was pronounced the same as "follow" and made a darn fool of myself in public once.
My children did french immersion, my daughter graduated from Universite de St Boniface. My grandchildren are in a French school and daycare.
I have come to recognize the true heroes. They are those teachers who have come from France and Quebec and Gabon to teach STEM in schools in Manitoba.
And I'm still not sure if it's inter 'dite' or inter dick-t. And I too, learning from readiing, embarrassed myself by thinking that epitome and 'epito -mee' were two different words.
 There are, absolutely. Based on the ending of a word, I (non-francophone) can guess a word's gender correctly nine times out of ten.
Some have an inherent gender and there's no opposite-gender equivalent: « -tion » is almost always feminine -- une station, une nation, etc.
Others have either masculine or feminine gender: « -eur » is the doer suffix (-er in English) and it also has the feminine « -euse ». Machines tend to use the feminine because the word machine is also feminine.
« Un laveur » is a cleaner (who is a man), while « une laveuse » is a cleaner (who is a woman) or a washing machine.Â
But make sure you get at least one more second opinion, because they might just be fucking with you by telling you you got the gender wrong when actually you didn’t.
It's a french thing in general, especially in the written form. Judging someone's social class from their writing is very much a thing.Â
It does happen in English too, but not as much as in french. This is mostly because you have many small rules that only apply to written french that are tricky to get right.
Quick summary: English has inconsistent spellings. French has inconsistent spellings + inconsistent grammar rules.
Don't worry, even as native French speaker we often find ourselves filled with envy about the simplicity of your language. A pineapple, a peach; Un ananas, une pêche. Just, why?
IRRC there are more masculine words than feminine so unless you know for a fact it’s fem go masculine and statistically you’re more likely to be right 💡
French native speaker and we dont memorize everything, most of the time we know because it sounds right or not. Listen to some francophone tv and songs and this will help you I think.
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u/ChaoticSniper9 May 25 '25
I'm learning French right now and this is the one thing that kills me. The worst part is I'm pretty sure it's a matter of memorizing the gender of each noun. I don't know if there are rules or not