Monday, July 26, 2010

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!

3 comments:

Aoife - Babaduck said...

Jesus, that takes me back to 5th year... I'd forgotten all of those rules!!!

Julie said...

I dont know if I just stopped listening after 3rd year but I seriously remember nothing after the passé composé!

camille said...

Those are definitely some helpful rules. Anyway, just discovered this lovely blog of yours. Off to go read some more :) Paris in Pink http://parisinpink.com/blog