Lesson 1.2: Noun Gender

Now that you’ve seen the pieces that make up French words and sentences, let’s talk about one of the most foundational concepts in French: noun gender.

In French, every noun is assigned one of two genders: masculine or feminine. This is true of every single noun, whether the thing it refers to has an actual gender or not. This is actually very common in world languages, especially European ones.

The reason noun gender matters is that other words in the sentence often change their form depending on a noun’s gender. Here are the ways that can happen:

• “The” is translated as le for masculine nouns and la for feminine nouns

  Examples: le camion (the truck); la voiture (the car)

• “A” is translated as un for masculine nouns and une for feminine nouns

  Examples: un camion (a truck); une voiture (a car)

• “It” is translated as il for masculine nouns and elle for feminine nouns

  Example: Il est rouge. (It is red, referring to a truck) Example: Elle est rouge. (It is red, referring to a car)

  Fun fact: il and elle also mean "he" and "she"

• “They” is translated as ils for masculine or mixed-gender groups and elles for feminine groups

  Example: Ils sont rouges. (They are red, referring to trucks or a group of cars and trucks) Example: Elles sont rouges. (They are red, referring to cars)

• Adjectives and possessive pronouns can change their form to match the noun they modify. (We'll explain how this works in Lessons 1.4 and 1.5)

  Example: un grand camion (a big truck); une grande voiture (a big car) Example: mon camion (my truck); ma voiture (my car)

While we’re on the topic of forms of “the” and “a” (called articles), here are two other articles that are good to know:

• The third translation of “the” is les, which is used for plural nouns (regardless of gender).
• The article des means the same thing as un, une, and “a,” and it’s used for plural nouns (regardless of gender). It doesn’t have a great translation into English, but it’s roughly equivalent to “some” as in “I ate some apples.”

Back to noun gender: funnily enough, some nouns have totally counterintuitive genders.

French speakers will still understand you if you mess up a noun’s gender, but they’ll think you sound strange. That’s why, when you’re learning a noun on the Word Drills page, it’s worth noticing its gender (displayed as (m) or (f) beside the noun) and trying to memorize it along with the word. If you like to practice with any resources other than Tongue of Fire, you can tell a noun’s gender there by seeing if it’s paired with un/le or une/la.

It may feel overwhelming at first, but as you learn and use more and more nouns, learning their genders will become second-nature.

Finally, there’s a trick to guessing a noun’s gender if you don’t know it: if the noun ends in E, it’s more likely to be feminine, and if it ends in anything else, it’s more likely to be masculine. That’s definitely not a hard-and-fast rule, but if you have to guess, this trick works more often than not.

That’s all you need to know about noun gender! Now you’re prepared to learn, understand, and use the gender of any noun you’ll encounter.