4.2 Gender — every noun is le or la — Epoché
What you will be able to do Accept that every French noun carries a gender, including nouns for things that obviously have no sex, and stop looking for a reason. Read the ending of an unfamiliar noun and predict its gender correctly about four times out of five, using twelve endings that between them cover a large part of the vocabulary. Choose between the seven forms that stand where English has the , a and an , and say why the choice has nothing to do with meaning. Build the habit of recording the gender at the moment you learn a noun, because it is the one piece of information you cannot reconstruct later. Sentences from this lesson, before the explanation. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English C'est un ordinateur. [1] It's a computer. C'est un problème. [2] This is a problem. C'est un village. [3] That's a village. Prerequisites : 4.1 — you should already know that a descriptive adjective follows the noun and that a short adverb sits next to the verb, since the examples here are full sentences with both in them. See 4.1 Grammar if you need it. This lesson is the one that English speakers find least reasonable, so let us be honest about it at the start. French divides every noun into two classes. One class takes one set of articles and adjective endings, the other takes a different set. The classes are called masculine and feminine, and for nouns that denote people or animals the label often lines up with sex. For everything else — a table, a problem, a decision, the weather — the label is arbitrary. There is no sense in which a knife is male and a fork is female. The gender is a fact about the word, not about the thing. Two consequences follow, and they pull in opposite directions. The bad news is that gender is not optional information: you cannot say anything about a noun without committing to one class or the other, because the article gives it away immediately. The good news is that gender is highly predictable from the shape of the word. It is not a random assignment that you have to memorise noun by noun. A reasonably small set of endings covers a large share of the lexicon, and those endings are worth learning as a block. Notice too that this is not a rare European eccentricity that you happen to have escaped. Most of the languages of Europe do this, and English used to. Old English had three genders and marked them on its articles and adjectives much as French does. English lost the system over a few centuries and kept almost nothing of it, which is why the modern language feels so bare here and why the French system feels so strange. You are not learning something exotic; you are learning something English mislaid. How English does it English has no grammatical gender at all. The only place where sex shows up in the English grammar is the third person singular pronoun, where you choose between he , she and it according to what you are talking about. Nouns themselves carry nothing. You can learn the English word for table without learning any further fact about it, and no other word in the sentence will change because of it. English has one definite article. The word the is the same in front of every noun in the language, singular or plural, count or mass, masculine or feminine in any other language. One word, one form, and the only variation is in how you pronounce it before a vowel. French needs four forms for the same job. English has two indefinite articles, and it picks between them by sound. You say a before a consonant sound and an before a vowel sound, which is why it is an hour but a hotel . This is a genuinely useful thing to notice, because it shows you already have the habit of letting the following sound decide the shape of a small grammatical word. French does the same thing with the definite article when it drops to a bare consonant before a vowel. The difference is that French also makes you choose by gender, which English never does. English has no article at all for indefinite plurals or for mass nouns. I have books , I want bread — the noun stands bare. French cannot leave a noun bare in these positions; it has a plural indefinite article and a partitive article, and the next lesson is about them. For now, the point is that where English has nothing, French has something, and that is why beginners under-produce articles rather than over-produce them. English pronouns for things are neuter, French pronouns are not. When you refer back to a table in English you say it . In French you say the word that also means he or the word that also means she , depending on the gender of the noun. So gender does not stay in the noun phrase: it propagates through the sentence, which is one more reason to record it when you learn the word. The seven forms where English has three words Here is the whole inventory. Read the table as definite against indefinite, masculine against feminine against plural, with the reduced form l' as the one extra row. Form Where it is used le the, before a masculine singular noun beginning with a consonant la the, before a feminine singular noun beginning with a consonant l' the, before any singular noun beginning with a vowel sound; the gender is hidden here, which is exactly why you must have learned it les the, before any plural noun; one form for both genders un a, an, before a masculine singular noun une a, an, before a feminine singular noun des some, any, or nothing at all in English; before a plural noun Count the rows: seven forms, and the last of them corresponds to an English word you often do not say. That is the shape of the problem. There is no way to be vague about it. If you do not know whether a countable noun is masculine or feminine you cannot put an article in front of it, and you cannot make a sentence about a countable noun without one. Look hard at the third row. Before a vowel the definite article loses its own vowel and attaches to the noun, so the form you hear and see tells you nothing abo