gender- french?

Question

In the language French, how do you know if a word is male or female( becuase of the verb's that are supposed to go with them)

Answer 1

If it's a man, it's masculine; if it's a woman, it's feminine. Other than that, except for a few endings (-age masculine, -tion feminine) you just have to memorize or absorb the gender.
Bonne chance!

Answer 2

Nouns [names of things] in French are either male or female, and you learn which is which when you learn the noun. Thus, "la chaise" [the chair] is feminine...as is "la lampe" [the lamp]; however, "le lit" [the bed] is masculine. Unlike English, French 'names of things' don't carry one form of 'the'. Building a sentence in French requires you to know M from F so you can conform verb endings as needed. As we used to say in French IV, "tres compliquee".

Answer 3

there is no simple rule. there are lots of tendencies, like the one mentioned by the other respondent, and many others, e.g., nouns in -tion are feminine and so on. These are very strong tendencies, some are even 100% true. There is also a fairly strong tendency for nouns ending in silent -e to be fem. and those ending in a silent consonant to be masc., but there are quite a few exceptions so this is much less than 100% true.

Answer 4

Don't understand the "verb" bit; but I do understand the problem. Unlike Spanish, there is no "o" or "a" ending to tip you off.
I'm afraid that there is no alternative to learning the gender at the same time as the word itself.

Answer 5

This is an excerpt from wiki. There are some special pronunciation characters that I was unable to convert in time for this post, so you should review the link in my source below.

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Every French noun has a grammatical gender, either masculine or feminine. The grammatical gender of a noun referring to a human or other mammal usually corresponds to the noun's natural gender (i.e., its referent's sex or gender). For such nouns, there will very often be one noun of each gender, with the choice of noun being determined by the natural gender of the person described; for example, a male singer is a chanteur, while a female singer is a chanteuse. In some cases, the two nouns are identical in form, with the difference only being marked in neighboring words (due to gender agreement; see below); a Catholic man is un Catholique, while a Catholic woman is une Catholique. Nonetheless, there are some such nouns that retain their grammatical gender regardless of natural gender; personne ("person") is always feminine, while (at least in "standard" French) professeur ("teacher") is always masculine, regardless of the sex of the person being referred to.

A noun's gender is not perfectly predictable from its form, but there are some trends. As a very broad trend, nouns ending in -e tend to be feminine, while the rest tend to be masculine, but there are very many exceptions. More consistently, some endings, such as -sion and -tion, occur almost exclusively on feminine nouns, while others, such as -eau, occur almost exclusively on masculine ones. Nonetheless, a noun that seems masculine from its form might actually be feminine (e.g., souris — "mouse"), or less commonly, vice versa (e.g., squelette — "skeleton").

As with English, nouns are inflected for number; the plural noun is usually formed from the singular by adding the suffix -s, or sometimes -x. However, since final consonants are generally not pronounced in French, adding -s or -x does not generally affect pronunciation, so the singular and plural forms of most nouns are generally pronounced the same. Further, nouns that end in -s (e.g., Français — "Frenchman") in their singular forms generally do not change forms even in writing. However, some nouns are pronounced differently in their plural forms: for example, œil ("eye") becomes yeux, cheval ("horse") becomes chevaux, and os ("bone" or "bones") is pronounced differently when it is plural ([o]) from when it is singular ([ɔs]); and even with nouns for which this is not the case, a distinction will still usually be made in speech, as there will usually be a neighboring article or determiner whose pronunciation does change with the noun's number (due to number agreement; see below). As with English, most uncountable nouns are grammatically treated as singular, though some are plural, such as les mathématiques ("mathematics"), and some nouns that are uncountable in English are countable in French, such as une information ("a piece of information").

Nouns in French are not inflected for any other grammatical categories. (However, personal pronouns are inflected case and person.)

Answer 6

You can know if a word is male or female if you teach your brain to be "gender-greedy". Starting slowly, getting used to paying attention to genders, letting gender become meaningful to you before you really aim at learning vocabulary must be wise.

Answer 7

You just have to learn a few rules. For instance, words ending in -ence are usually feminine (la....), except for silence.. which is not feminine (le silence)

Masculine (le) - generally:
words ending in a consonant
nouns ending in -ment
nouns ending in -eau

Feminine (la) - generally
nouns ending in a vowel+e
nouns ending in a double consonant +e
nouns ending in -ance, -ence, -ense. -iere
nouns ending in -ude, -ure, -ade, -ace
nouns ending in -son, -ion
nouns ending in -te, -eur


... but there are always exceptions... just have to be learned!