All the endings of French nouns and their correlation with gender
Several years I have been occasionally learning French. I did not hurry because I did not need to have perfect French. But now I need to improve my French and I got more interested in its subtleties.
In my experience, the major difficulty in French is not the vocabulary, but the genders of nouns. Knowing the spelling of a noun is not enough; to combine it with other parts of speech, you need to know its gender. The gender determines what article (e.g. à la vs. au) or pronoun (sa vs. son) to use, as well as how to write the adjective (gentil vs. gentille) or verb (fait vs. faite). On the computer this is not a big issue — all grammatical errors are automatically underlined and corrections are suggested. You can also use online dictionaries and Google Translate. In speech the difference between sentences with masculine and feminine nouns is even more noticeable but you cannot rely on a computer for help.
The only way to be sure about the gender of a noun is to memorise every noun together with its gender. French people can do that, but for others it is not so simple. Fortunately there is an approximate way: French nouns with the same ending tend to share the same gender. For example, you can know…
