can someone explain to me how can you tell if you need feminine ending or masculine ending in french please?

Question

i have a project do on monday and i dont know how to explain gendars for the french language. can someone please help me?


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Answer 1

Well the best way to find out if the word is masculin or feminine is just looking in a french/english dictionary and looking for the m or f symbol. Also, if you have a program such as word perfect and you can change the language to french, the program will automatically let you know if it's wrong and you can change it by spell checking what you have typed.
Hope this helps and good luck with your project

Answer 2

What gender is, is a very complicated question. It's basically just an attribute that every noun has, and is tenuously related to sex. Most languages (English being an exception) have noun genders of masculine and feminine; many also have a third gender, neuter (this word comes from Latin and means "neither").

In some languages it's easy to tell the gender. People say Spanish is easy to tell, and that's true for some nouns; but there are others that don't fit an obvious pattern. In French on the other hand, is very difficult to tell. As somebody else said, you can tell if there's an article in front of the noun: "le" or "l'" (that's L-apostrophe, as in l'amour) means masculine, "la" means feminine. However this is not as useful as it could be: "les" could be either masculine or feminine, and this doesn't help you if you are WRITING French.

An imperfect rule that has helped me is: if the word ends in unaccented "e", it's probably feminine. That will get you through many situations. Another rule is that, although gender is not completely tied to sex, they are related. So, nouns to name or describe males are masculine, while nouns for females are feminine. These include jobs, nationalities, etc; but it does NOT include attributes that are thought to be masculine or feminine (such as what the other person said, "virility")

The attributes bring up another important category: abstract nouns that end in accented "e": virilité, fraternité, liberté, etc. These are mostly all derived from Latin words that end in "tas" and because of that are all feminine. (These come into Spanish as words that end in "dad", which are also feminine.)

Finally, there are loan words from other languages which are often masculine regardless of form. For example, there are a number of words from Greek (such as "probleme") that end in unaccented "e" but are nonetheless masculine. These generally come from a neuter in Greek.

So, the upshot is that there's no easy way to know across the board. I believe the best thing you can do is to learn some of these rules, and then mentally put words under one or the other rules. For adults, I think that's a better way than rote memorization.

Answer 3

In french all things have a gender, which is masculine or feminine. When you are talking about a something that is masculine, you will use the article le or un. If it is feminine, you will use the article la or une. There are some guidlines that are used. A word which ends in nne is often female, une personne, male words dont have rules, but if you look at the adjectives or articles you can see. The best way is to listen to french and then you will be able to hear when the word is male or female. You will know when it sounds correct

Answer 4

From the wording of your question, it's hard to tell if you are talking about the gender of nouns, adjectives, or other words (like past participles in compound tenses).

For English speakers, there isn't a fail-proof way of knowing if a noun is masculine or feminine- there are exceptions to every rule. However, with nouns, if you use "Le truc des genres" at this webpage http://www.fourmilab.ch/francais/glue.html (scroll all the way down to the bottom), you can guess the gender of most nouns.

If you are talking about adjectives, look at Raynebow's response.

If your project concerns gender in the French language, Gary B offers the most complete response.

Answer 5

Gender in nouns cannot generally be known just by looking at the word itself (though you can get a feel for them). For example, virility (virilité) is feminine. Go figure. You just need to learn the gender of each noun individually. For people and personal pronouns, gender corresponds to the gender of the person (he "lui" or she "elle", etc.). Is that what you wanted to know?

Answer 6

This is a complicated request, but here's a try. You can tell a feminine word by "la" in front, and a masculine word would have "le". USUALLY, you add an "s" after a word for masculine plural, and "e" for feminine, and an "es" for feminine plural.
Ex:
bleu (masc)
bleus (masc. plural)
bleue (fem)
bleues (fem plural)

Not sure if this is what you were asking...

Answer 7

It depends on the word but generally the masculin word ending in "n" take an "e" in the feminin form. Example:Copin(masc.) copine(femin.) If the word ends in "eur" in the masculin form it becomes "euse" for the feminin example: Chanteur(masc.) chanteuse(femin.) but in certain words the feminin form takes "rice" example acteur (masc.) actrice (femin.). The words ending in "ant" or "and" takes an "e" in the feminin form. Words ending in "il" change into "ille" like gentil(masc.) gentille (fem.)

Answer 8

Wow... um, I've spoken French all my life and I really can't explain it to you. To me it's just something that you know... if you use the wrong gender, it just doesn't sound right. We've been trying to explain it to my step-dad for the last 6 years and he still doesn't get it.

Answer 9

I liked Raynebow answer.