Genders

Genders is designed to help learners to form the associations of words by which native speakers know the gender of nouns.

Genders uses a word list containing all the relevant nouns in the Larousse Dictionnaire du Français Essentiel and Le Français Fondamental, 2500 words and contexts in all.

The system presents these nouns in packets of 20 at a time together with the feminine and masculine forms of associated contexts.

The learner has the option of choosing F or M or Not Sure.

Genders will then show a context in which the difference between masculine and feminine can be heard when speaking.

Further information on Genders

Noun gender is one of the most exasperating features of French for a foreign learner. Yet it is an area of grammar that French children have no difficulty with at all.

Recent research in Canada has shown that French speakers' skill with noun gender depends on observing regularities in the pronunciation of the endings of words.

For example, over 99% of the 2000 words in Petit Larousse ending with a nasal /a/ sound (banc, sang, gant etc) are masculine.

These regularities can be summarised in a set of about 40 rules. Most native speakers have, of course, no explicit knowledge of these rules. They can, however, be useful to a learner.

Learners of French will therefore use their acquired intuition as well as their explicit, conscious, knowledge in choosing the gender of a noun.

Guessing when one doesn't know the answer is unhelpful, and can be confusing. Therefore Genders encourages learner to click on Not Sure, when they do not know whether to choose F or M.

Download the Genders Demo