Masculine or Feminine?

So I have a pretty good level of french, but its spoken french, my grammar is a disaster. One of the things that annoys me is never having a clue whether something is masculine or feminine!

Well I have been studying up and am currently flying through an intermediate grammar book. I found a chapter on masc/fem and who knew but there are RULES! Why did no one tell me this before!!

So I'm going to do a very limited sum up here for those who are interested. Anyone who's reading who has no interest in french, stop reading now!

So all words ending in:

• age - except nage, plage, cage, page, image which are feminine
• ment
• eau
• phone
• scope
• isme

are masculine so are le or un e.g. le fromage

All words ending in:

• tion
• sion
• té - except côté, été, comité, deputé, paté which are masculine
• ette
• ance
• ence - except silence which is masculine
• ure - except mercure/cyanure which are masculine
• ode/ade/ude

are feminine so la or une e.g. une voiture

Then theres are some lists:

Masculine:

un- problème, système, programme, volume, modèle, groupe, domaine

Feminine

une - couleur, odeur, saveur, peur, douleur

I'm not an expert I just found this today, but I thought it was quite helpful. No doubt its in no way exhaustive but its a start!

Summer

Well summer is well and truly upon us and by that I mean that I have finished work until mid September. Now this sounds great and all and this is usually the time that parisians flee Paris for their country residences, but due my lack of country pile and a bureaucratic nightmare which has resulted in me not being paid a huge chunk of money, I will be staying in gay paree.

Luckily the weather has calmed down, as we had a run of mid 30 weather there for a while and my fair skinned Irish constitution was DYING!

Anyway my plan for my break is the 3 fs: french, fat and fun in no particular order. French is studying to get the level up as I have an exam at the end of August, fat is well obvious and a good start has been made with me and the legend Helene of manshopper fame, undertaking a 45 day bikini challenge.

Fun has been seriously lacking in my life the last few months for many reasons. But I remedied that this weekend by starting the holidays off with a bang! I took myself off to Parc Asterix, which is a theme park just north of Paris. It was a really fun day! The rollercoasters made me scream from the bottom of my stomach and the candy floss was cheap and plentiful! I was exhausted by the end of the day but it was brilliant! I think screaming like that is good for you!

Today was the finish of the Tour de France and I went to the Champs Elysees to watch it. I am big Tour fan so I bought a big yellow tshirt and cheered everyone (apart from maybe Contador!) on like a mad thing!

Tonight was Inception at the movies... I think I need some time to digest that one!