Une méthode astucieuse

Richard Good

Knowing the gender of nouns – masculine or feminine – is important if you want to become fluent in French.

When you have difficulty remembering whether to say

le or la
un or une
de la or du
à la or au

before a noun, it can undermine your confidence and make it harder for native speakers to understand you.

If memorising the gender of nouns is an issue for you, try this method and see if it works for you.

The challenge

The best way of learning the gender of nouns is to do so when you learn the word itself. Those whose native language contains grammatical genders do so naturally.

But if you speak a language that doesn’t generally give genders to nouns – English for example – learning gender doesn’t come instinctively. So it’s easy to end up with a stack of vocabulary at your disposal without knowing how to use it properly.

You can try simply making a list of words and learning their gender. In practice that turns out to be not so straightforward. We need to use knowledge to keep it active in the memory and there’s a danger you’ll end up feeling like you’re pour water into a leaking bucket.

A solution

A more effective way of memorising is this. Think of a noun whose gender you have difficulty with.

• If it is a masculine noun, associate it in your mind with an adjective whose pronunciation is always the same, whether it be masculine or feminine.
• If it is a feminine noun, associate it in your mind with an adjective whose pronunciation changes according to the gender.

Instead of trying to remember “is this word masculine or feminine?” – memorise the noun-adjective combination. From it, you’ll automatically know the gender: any noun associated with an adjective whose sound is invariable is masculine, any noun associated with an adjective whose sound changes is feminine.

If it all sounds a little complicated, in practice most people discover that it’s much easier to memorise noun-adjective combinations than it is to learn the gender as a standalone concept.

Some examples

Say you have difficulty remembering whether the French word for « méthode » is feminine or masculine. You check in the dictionary, it’s feminine, so you associate it in your mind with an adjective that does change:

une méthode astucieuse

The word for “choice” is masculine, so associate it with an adjective whose pronunciation doesn’t change:

un choix difficile

Now the next time you’re puzzling over the gender of « choix » you will think of « choix difficile ». « Difficile » has an invariable sound, so you know – because of the artificial memorisation rule you’ve established for yourself – that it is « un choix difficile ». Similarly, because, you know the sound of the adjective « astucieux » changes (astucieux, astucieuse), it is « une méthode astucieuse ». Below are some more examples to give you the idea:

Making it stick

For association technique work best if you make your own lists: firstly it means you focus on the vocabulary that’s of interest to you, secondly the work of making the mental link is part of the memorising process. Once you’ve got your words to focus on, spaced repetition flashcard tools such as anki work well; but pencil and paper or unsupported mental exercise can be equally effective.

To give anki a try, download the free software, then import these flashcards