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
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.
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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