Learn French Nouns

When you learn French, you will spend a lot of time memorizing nouns. Nouns are words that refer to a person, place or thing. Basically, everything that you see around you is a noun – the computer, your fingers, the sky, etc.  Nouns also refer to things you can’t see, such as molecules, electricity, thoughts, etc.  Any tangible thing or intangible concept that you can identify and assign a name to is a noun.

In French, nouns have a gender.  They are either masculine or feminine.  This can be a strange concept for people who grew up speaking English, because in the English language, nouns do not have a gender – they are “gender-neutral”.

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Since French nouns are always either masculine or feminine, whenever you learn a new French noun, you must always learn which gender it is.  Don’t slack on this, because it’s of the utmost importance!  The gender of the noun will “take charge” and affect some of the other words you use with it in a sentence, such as the articles and the adjectives, and sometimes pronouns and verbs.  The articles and adjectives must always “agree” with the gender of the noun that they refer to.

Let’s see how this works:

Articles Used With Singular Nouns:

Examples:

In short:

If the noun is feminine, you will use either “une” or “la” before the noun.
If the noun is masculine, you will use either “un” or “le” before the noun.

Plural nouns are a bit easier, because you will use “les” before both masculine and feminine nouns:

Let’s take a look at how all of this comes together in sentence form:

When you make flash cards to help you learn French nouns, don’t simply write “table” or “livre”, because you’ll have no idea what the gender is and you’ll be forced to go back and relearn the noun’s gender later. Always create flash cards with the article + the noun: “une table” or “le livre”.

Luckily, there are some basic patterns that can help you determine whether a noun is masculine or feminine. For instance, words that end in “-ion” are usually feminine. Words that end in “-eau” are usually masculine. Here is a basic guideline that you can help you determine a noun’s gender:

Remember, there are always exceptions to these types of patterns, so it’s best to double-check a noun’s gender when you are learning new words!

To make things even more interesting, there are certain nouns that can change gender! Many nouns that refer to people or animals can be either masculine or feminine, depending on the specific person or animal that you are referring to.

For example:

In many cases, you can change a masculine noun into a feminine noun by adding an “e” to the end, as in the first example of “ami/amie”. But as you can see from the second example, there are different rules for certain other nouns.

When in doubt about a noun’s gender or how to change a noun from masculine to feminine, always refer to a French/English dictionary!

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