French is a beautiful language when spoken correctly and many people have referred to it as the language of love and passion because of this and perhaps because there is so much reference to gender in the language that people are always thinking of men and women when speaking it. Basic French lessons need to incorporate this idea of gender but we do need to separate this from the idea of sex as every noun has a gender but a chair for instance is not really male nor female but it will always be considered male (Chaise - Chair, la chaise The Chair).
What is confusing to students trying to learn French quickly is that discovering what noun is associated with what gender. This is not an easy task when trying to learn a language like French but there are a few ways you can understand the basic concepts behind the noun/gender riddle.
The first thing you must know is that there is no "rule" to assigning genders to nouns in French, there is not logical way you can take a noun and simply apply a gender to it based on some fact or another they are what they are from history and any attempt to categorize them ends with so many exceptions to the rule that the rules break so the first thing you must do is simply accept that there are no rules only hints!
The second more solid thing in French language learning is that the prefix and suffix (start and end) to a word or phrase can define the gender and make it easier to understand. For instance:
Words ending with -eau are considered male so:
- l'eau is water
- la peau is skin
Both of these nouns are considered male, there is no reason behind this it is just the way the language works!
Similarly there are rules for female nouns such as:
Words ending with -ique are considered female so:
- un périphérique is a peripheral
- un graphique is a graph
To learn languages is to understand the rules even if they do not seem to make sense and basic French lessons need to include a good grounding in these concepts before you can more on to more advance things.
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