However, French has a rather impressive number of irregular adjectives, which is one of the many things that makes it hard to learn French for beginners. Photo credit: caribbeanfreephoto on Visual hunt ´Since "école" is feminine, the adjecti "maternel" has to agree and becomes "maternelle". Generally, the feminine is formed with -e, the masculine or general plural in -s and the feminine plural in -es:Īmusant - amusante - amusants - amusantesĬheck for French classes Montreal here. The rule for gender and number of French adjectives So, when speaking French, do you have put the adjectives in the feminine and masculine? Well, mostly. Let's go Learning French Gender Words: Making Adjectives Agree in Gender and Number If you come upon a word you don’t know, if you are lucky the article will be right there next to it to help you along.Īnd while French fortunately doesn’t decline its articles, it’s useful to know them in all their iterations, from indefinite articles to possessive pronouns: When taking French grammar lessons, the easiest way to know if a word is masculine or feminine is quite simply by learning it with its article (or looking it up in the dictionary). He reads the book to the mouse.* Il lit le livre à la souris. Some examples of pronouns in different grammatical positions within a French sentence (with their translation): Note: if you want to use a plural encompassing both masculine and feminine things, use “ils”.Īnother note: in French, me, te, le, la are contracted if the word that follows begins with a vowel: Here are the basic French pronouns: English If this person is the object of the sentence, we say: Flaubert is taking him places I had never known.Īnd if he or she is the indirect object: Reading is the best thing that ever happened to him. He is reading a book by Gustave Flaubert. Like many languages, French personal pronouns are declined - that is, they look different depending on their grammatical function within a French sentence. Let's go French Personal Pronouns and Their Cases Then we can look at the definite and indefinite articles and finally answer the most burning question of all: h ow can you tell the gender of a French word? So let us first take a look at the pronouns involved and see how we decline our tables and buckets. Like most Romance languages - and even English - it does decline its pronouns. It’s “une table” and “un sceau”, and when you are using pronouns you will say “elle est mise” (”she (the table) is set”) and “il est plein” (”he (the bucket) is full”).įortunately, one thing the French language doesn’t do (but some other languages such as German and Greek do) is decline its articles or nouns. ![]() Yet that is exactly how French grammar works. While in the English language you will say “he” for a man or a stallion and “she” for a woman or a cow - you wouldn’t call a table “she” or a bucket “he”. One of the main ways that French grammar differs from English is the existence of genders for things as well as people.
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