this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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But French is so hard to find rules about that compared to say Spanish.
| English | French | Spanish | ? | |
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|
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| |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.
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)