• merc@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    But French is so hard to find rules about that compared to say Spanish.

    English French Spanish ?
    a mouse une souris el raton / el mouse so in French “-is” is a female ending?
    a mouse pad un tapis de souris una afombrilla de mouse no, tapis is male, even if souris is female
    a cable un câble un cable ok, if it ends in “e” it’s male?
    an icon un icône un icono yes, ends in “e” it’s male!
    the memory la memoire la memoria no, ends in “e” it’s female!

    Spanish is much simpler: ends in ‘a’ it’s mostly female (except stupid poema, and a few others), ends in ‘o’ it’s male (except foto, and a few others). If there’s a rule to French I don’t know it, and none of my French teachers knew it. If you’re French, you just grow up learning which words are male and which are female, so French speakers just naturally know and can’t explain it.

    • Interesting_Test_814@jlai.lu
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, there are quite a lot of exceptions but “-e is female, otherwise is male” works most of the time. Then if you want to be more precise you can remember some generic exceptions like -age, -isme are male and -tion, -té is female. You’ll still have some exceptions like une souris, une vis, une dent, un câble, un graphe, un cône, une image (exception to the exception) but it probably works in about 80-90% of cases.

      (Also “icône” is actually female in French)