One of the biggest problems I have had with learning to speak French is the sex!
I don’t mean anything dirty or smutty here – I mean the fact that when you’re learning to speak French you need to remember that everything is either masculine or feminine. It’s either le (male) or la (female) for “the” – or un (male) or une (female) for “a”.
If you’re Spanish, Italian or Portuguese this is no big deal (those languages are constructed in the same way) and Germans have even add a neutral tense so that’s worse – but for us English speakers it’s something completely new. We just say “table” or “knife”, we don’t have to remember it’s Mrs Table and Mr Knife!
What would be useful would be if there were some pointers you could use – like all words beginning with “P” were masculine, for example.
No such luck. What’s worse is that things you would think were one thing, are the opposite. I don’t want to be sexist here but you would think a bra would be feminine, wouldn’t you?
Nope. Not in French. It’s masculine, le soutien-gorge. How can that be!!!?
So unfortunately there really is no way around it. When you learn the French for something you have to learn it’s gender too. It’s not the end of the world, and most times it doesn’t matter, but it can cause confusion on occasions because sometimes words can have le and la variations.
For example, le tour means a tour – like the tour de France cycle race or a tour around the countryside. La tour is a tower – the Eiffel Tower is la Tour Eiffel.
Le poêle is a stove but La poêle is a frying pan. Probably the worst is le mari, husband and la mari, marijuana!
Make the effort though and most French people will either politely correct you or ignore it. It’s frustrating at first if you are putting an effort into learning to speak French but it comes with practice.
Working the other way it’s usually easier. If it’s got an e on the end it’s usually feminine – la chaise, the chair. Stylo is pen. No e on the end so masculine – le stylo. Of course if the word has a vowel at the start they’ve got you again because they hide the le or la. L’enveloppe (yep, envelope) is actually femenine. L’éléphant (yep, elephant) is masculine.
So how can you tell? You can’t, but if you look at the ‘a’ or ‘an’ version it’s some help because an elephant is un éléphant, hence masculine. An envelope is une enveloppe, hence feminine.
Confused yet?
The point of all this, I suppose, is that when you start out learning to speak French you need some kind of structured help. Like the free lessons you can get from either of those two ads on the right. Just coming here and learning French on the fly can be done – but you’re making it more difficult for yourself than you need to.
Learning French in France helps enormously, of course, there’s no better way than immersing yourself in the culture and talking to French people every day. That’s not really practical for most people though – and even then I would still recommend some kind of course or lessons first, just so you get the basics down.
Learning a new language is always a challenge but it’s much easier now than when I was a kid and if you’re going to spend time here it’s well worth it. Not learning French means you miss out, not just on what’s going on around you, but also on a certain je ne sais quoi of French life.
Take advantage of the modern learning systems available and you’ll not only learn quicker, you’ll have more fun.
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