Why are French words masculine and feminine? Finally understand gender in French

Learning French is confusing enough before you start to throw in the fact that some words are masculine and feminine. Frequently learners ask why French nouns are masculine and feminine. In this video, I explain why French uses grammatical gender and how it can actually be beneficial. A lot of languages in the world use grammatical gender, but English is not one of those.

🪴SUPPORT MY CHANNEL

👍 STAY CONNECTED

🎓 SIGN UP FOR MY BESTSELLING LANGUAGE COURSES

🎵 MUSIC

[boredmillionaire]

How scary would French look if they modified their spelling to reflect their pronunciation? lol

[ArturoSubutex]

Actually there's a pretty simple general rule: words that end in -e are generally feminine (la tablE, la chaisE, la fourchettE), others are generally masculine (le bureau, le fauteuil, le couteau). There's a simple reason fort that: -e is the feminine ending (see grand v grande) & corresponds to -a in latin and other romance languages.
This general rule is obviously overridden by the more specific rules that words in -age (mariage) or -isme (impressionisme) are masculine, and words in -tion/-ssion (information, permission) or -eur (chaleur, douleur, fleur... except for names of profession like vendeur) are feminine.

[dimitralenanakou]

My mother language is Greek, but I learn German and French and I have to say that many times I confuse the genders of the words, because they are sometimes different from language to language.🤷‍♀️🙄🙁😅

[jeanbob]

Good video, just a precision a s a french speaker: In your example the phrase 'j'ai acheté une chemise et un anneau, mais elle est trop grande' sounds weird in french. 'j'ai acheté un anneau et une chemise, mais elle trop grande' sounds a bit better
but 'j'ai acheté un anneau et une chemise, mais la chemise est trop grande' ... or 'j'ai acheté plusieurs trucs/choses, dont une chemise, mais elle est trop grande...' sounds more 'normal' to me.

[jLjtremblay]

The “rules”? There are several noun endings (14 masculine and 25 feminine, give or take) that one eventually memorizes subconsciously that are pretty foolproof 99% of the time. So, in reality, it’s not as overwhelming as it first seems. We natives make mistakes all the time with uncommon nouns and to make this even more fun, gender can sometimes differ between France and Canada.

[eltondiassis]

During the day I speak Portuguese and Italian. I hate haveing to change gender of objects. For example, "Ponte" (bridge) is male in Italian and female in Portuguese.

[larrywayne]

I am 67, so the rapidity of the sentence allows me to miss words. But I am beginning to recognize words and phrases used. It’s going to be tough, but I will do it!

[TheSandkastenverbot]

Grammatical gender in French: maybe as chaotic as a child's room a day after cleaning up
Grammatical gender in German: post-war apocalypsis maximum entropy chaos

[chrisk]

Hens are female chickens! Also the ending/suffix -En in chicken really comes from the old Germanic as the plural ending like oxen is the plural form of ox and children is the plural of child — Well chicken was originally the plural of chick.

[dankdoge]

Nice little video. Just would’ve added « cet » to the « ce » at the end

[cozywalrus]

i always found it strange that the word for beard in french is feminine 🤔😂

[LA-qkko]

This is great, but in the video, you need to change the spelling of grande to grand if you are talking about the anneau as it is masculine.

[kaymuldoon]

I always thought all Latin languages had masculine & feminine nouns, not just French. In fact, I could have sworn I heard somewhere that English was one of the few languages that did not have masculine or feminine nouns. Maybe I’m mistaken.

[brunocorticelli]

attention aux nombreux pièges ! "Un" éloge flatteur ; augure est masculin même si on prononce le bon de "bon augure" "bonne".

[jerstumc]

It's the same with german, and it's worse because there are three gender and there's basically no rule, there are some rules but it's just a percentage of them, basically, you need to just learn them

[tomatosauce]

Graffiti from 2000 years ago in Pompeii?! That’s amazing

[invokeur]

Yeaah but when talking about a ring I would say "une bague" rather than "un anneau" ;) Example still works but bague is more common.

[Furienna]

Since all those neutral Latin nouns merged into the masculine gender, there must be more masculine than feminine nouns in French. But I wonder what percentage is masculine and what percentage is feminine.

[jbfbd]

Hi, one should say ‘une bague’ for ‘a ring’, not ‘un anneau’ other than this I love your video, thank you for sharing!

[danachos]

How many dialects of French are there in the USA and Canada (not just "québécois" and "cajun")? How many are there globally?

And: What is the difference between oral French, français signé, LSQ, LSF, LSFB, LaSiMa, LaSiBo, Protactile and others? Aka between aural and manual languages in francophone areas. What are the differences and similarities/are the sign languages actually just français signé ou bien qqch d'autre ?