Why Are French Words MASCULINE or FEMININE? // How To Identify Masculine and Feminine in French!

Finally understand gender in French! In French, words have a gender, they are masculine or feminine. But why are French words masculine or feminine? Why is a fork feminine and a knife masculine in French? This can be very confusing for native English speakers who learn French but also for other people, because from one language to the other, the gender of a word can change! So in today's video, we are talking about gender in French and in languages in general and we are trying to understand the origin of gender in French! At the end of the video, I share tips on how to identify masculine and feminine in French!

ALL THE WORDS ENDING

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VOCABULARY
Se faire à l'idée - to get used to the idea
Être habituée - to be used to
Se rendre compte - to realize
Je dois avouer - I have to admit
Au départ - at first
Au fil du temps - over time
Une bêtise - something stupid
Dans une langue donnée - in a given language
Perdu(e) - lost
Malheureusement - unfortunately
Avoir sous la main - to have at hand
Une terminaison - ending
Infaillible - foolproof

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[zxasskickerxz]

J'aime que vous parlez lentement. Merci beaucoup !

[colortheworld]

Hi, so my native language is German. As you said in the video we actually have three "genders". So it‘s very nice to "only" have to learn two new ones when learning French. In German it’s actually really hard to determine the gender of a noun, because there are actually almost no rules to it. An inanimate object can either be "neutral" das Auto (the car), feminine die Sonne (the sun, again, here it’s super confusing when learning French, because it’s the other way around) or masculine der Handschuh (the glove). It’s just really confusing when learning other languages whose nouns also have genders and they are actually different than the ones you’re used to… The sad thing about german is that we do have three "Genders" but only two pronouns er/sie (he/she) that can be used to address other people (there is a third pronoun “es” (it), but you only use that for talking about animals or inanimate objects, it would be VERY insulting to address another human-being with “es”). So there is not really a way to address non-binary folx. Also, the german language is full of generic terms that are not inclusive and are often only used in the masculine form. Still I feel like it’s easier for Germans to learn French than it is for English-speakers, because we actually have to learn less articles because we have soo many rules for different sentence-structures (german: all the articles you can use for car/cars, depending on the sentence: Auto(s) it’s “das Auto” btw, if you just want to say “the car” haha confused jet😅)

[warsupreme]

Thank you for this video, it was very helpful for someone who is having a lot of trouble learning the genders of words in french even tho my mother language has masculine and feminine words. Like, in portuguese we say "o/um carro" that is "the/a car", but with a masculine meaning and in french you say "la voiture", that is feminine. It makes me so confused :') but I'll keep practicing and overtime I'm sure I'll get it.

[mr.anirbangoswami]

Thank you. Those word endings are gonna be super helpful and thanks for the interesting discussion. It was very good to listen to that.

[mraaronfr]

always coming with the great tips and content! fantastic thanks!

[isvilainesilva]

Je adore ton video! Ils aide moi a apprendre boucoup des mots! Merci Elsa

[moonrise-w-]

In turkish, there is no such thing as assigning a gender to objects actually! A lot of words related to humans are also gender-neutral, for example “arkadaş” (friend). But if a person wants to make sure that a certain friend is female, male, etc., they add the gender in front of it: “kız arkadaş” (word on word translation: girl friend) “erkek arkadaş” (boy friend). Thus, it is also way more convenient for non-binary people, because they won’t get misgendered as much!

[CADEV]

my friend who speaks fluent french says he can hear the english in my french from my sentence structure. how do i formulate my sentances correctly and evolve my sentence structure?

[luznavarroblazquez]

En espagnol nous avons des genres aussi et ils sont ennuyeux! Merci beaucoup pour la vidéo!!

[denisemoore]

New to your channel - your videos are excellent - I hope that you are safe - praying for peace

[luisangelcanomorales]

Elsa bonjour je suis de Colombie j'ai trois ans dans la France actualment je suis en train de Parler bien le francais mais je oublie le mots tres rapide qui peut je Faire merci

[tashipema]

Merci beaucoup vous êtes très gentille et ça aide beaucoup

[gabriellagirardi]

Merci bcp. Cette leçon m'a beaucoup aidée á comprendre la différence entre le genre masculin et féminin.

[Hy-ibnt]

well i'm Turkish. there is no feminine or masculine kind of differentiation between the words.
if someone tells you something like this, you better wait for him or her to continue to speak, otherwise you can not figure out if the person he or she is talking about is a man or woman.

O bir kaç çift elbise almaya gidecek. ( he or she is going to go buy a few pair of clothes. )
O means he or she
bir kaç çift means a few pair
elbise means clothes
almaya means buy
gidecek means is going to go

as you can see above unless he or she mention the person's name or give you some sort of a hint as to what its gender is, you might never know if it's a man or a woman. :)

while talking about Turkish, another hint that i think may help you comprehend the language properly is this: wait for Turkish people to finish their sentences if you wanna understand what they're talking about because other languages have this gramatical structure in which the verbs are usually presented at the beginning of the sentences, whereas in Turkish it's the other way round. you can not get what is being talked about if you don't listen to them until the very end.

[priyelicious]

thanks...i didn't know some of these endings...but the exceptions can be tricky haha

[dorjibhutuktsang]

Merci beaucoup à prof Elsa, je suis très heureux d’apprendre beaucoup de choses sur votre chaîne YouTube qui m’aide d’améliorer la langue française étrangère et j’ai bien compris come vous parlez lentement, moi je suis tibétain et je suis en France depuis 6 ans mais je suis allé à l’école que 3 mois car je travaille tous les jours donc je n’ai pas assez le temps mais j’ai bien motivé et intéressant d’apprentissage si j’ai le temps libre, merci encore, à bientôt et bonne journée.

[nebecitah]

En Turc on n'a pas de genres comme Français. Donc c'est un peu difficile pour moi mais je peux recommande une application "Le La" je utilise cette application est ça marche très bien je pense. Je ne sais pas si c'est marche en apple d'ailleurs

[eh]

En Allemagne on a trois genres et souvent ils n'ont pas aucun sens mais comme une locutrice native c'est normalement pour moi... mais je souvent perds le contrôle de moi-même quand je confonds les genres en Français.. parfois apprendre une langue est très difficile :) merci beaucoup pour tes vidéos, ils sont super et m'aident vraiment!

[abhijyotsingh]

Genders in french play a vital role in the learning of language

[emmasachi]

This was extremely interesting and helpful. Thanks Elsa. French is definitely more complex than English.