Module 1 of 10
Le, la, les — the gender you cannot avoid
Every noun has one, almost nothing predicts it, and you learn it with the word.
Every French noun is masculine or feminine, including the ones that are obviously neither. A table is feminine, a book is masculine, and no amount of thinking about tables will tell you why. Endings give weak hints — words in -tion and -té are usually feminine, words in -ment and -eau usually masculine — but the hints have enough exceptions that leaning on them costs you more than it saves. Learn the article with the word, as one unit: not table but la table, not livre but le livre. A vocabulary list without articles is a list you will have to learn twice.
Hindi and Punjabi speakers have an advantage here that English speakers do not: you already carry gender on nouns and you already change the words around them to match. The trap is assuming the genders line up with yours. They often do not — किताब is feminine in Hindi and livre is masculine in French — so treat French gender as new information about a French word, never as a translation of the gender you already know. Before a vowel both articles shrink to l', which hides the gender exactly when you are learning it; that is why l'école is a word you should learn as une école the first time you meet it.
Played by your device’s own French voice. It is a synthetic voice, not a recording of a teacher — close enough to learn the shape of a word, not close enough to copy exactly.
- Le livreThe book — masculine
- La tableThe table — feminine
- Les livresThe books — les is the plural for both genders
- L'écoleThe school — le or la becomes l' before a vowel
- La porteThe door
- Le téléphoneThe phone
- La chambreThe bedroom
- C'est quel genre ?Which gender is it? — a question worth asking out loud
Learn the article with the noun, in one piece. Your own language's gender for a word tells you nothing about the French one.