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Nouns
A noun is a label for people, animals, places, things, and ideas.
French nouns are either masculine or feminine, and are accompanied by either an article or an adjective.
Names for people and kinds of people.
Some names are usually masculine; these are usually professions. But this is also changing, and it’s usually fine to add an “e” to job titles to make them feminine.
Un professeur, une professeure
Un médecin
Some nouns have different endings for women and for men. People are still likely to talk about a woman as une actrice (rather than un acteur).
Some nouns are always feminine.
Une vedette (movie star) une personne
Une victime une créature
Gender:
Gender:
In French, all nouns have a gender, and so do pronouns, adjectives, and articles. You can tell a noun’s gender in several ways.
Do you want to use the word in speaking or writing? Then, you need to memorize it.
Do you want to find out the gender of a noun when you are reading it or hearing it (so you can answer the text or the person talking)? Look and listen for the article (un, un, le, la) or the adjective (ton, ta, petit, petite, bon, bonne…). These will tell you the gender.
Memorizing some basic rules about gender in French can help, too.
Memorizing gender:
Because grammatical gender is generally arbitrary (=not logical), it’s very important to memorize a noun's gender along with its spelling and pronunciation. The best way to do this is to memorize the article when you memorize the noun.
So when you are creating flashcards or sentences to memorize vocabulary, write out the article with each noun.
Figuring out gender
Figuring out gender
You can sometimes figure out the gender of a noun by using these rules.
Gender can often be figured out from the ending of the word. BUT when in doubt, look it up in the chapter vocabulary list.
Masculine: Typically, words ending in: -age, -ment, -eau, -phone, -scope, -isme (but there are exceptions)
Feminine: Typically, words ending in: -tion,-sion, -té, -ette, -ance, -ence, -ie, -ure, -ode/-ade/-ude (but there are exceptions)
Plural noun forms:
Many French nouns add an -s to indicate plural, like in English.
No change: nouns ending in -s, -x, -z in the singular
Nouns ending in -s, -x, or -z do not change in the plural.
Plural with -x: nouns ending in -al, -ail, -au, -eu, -eau, -ou in the singular: usually change to -x in the plural
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