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How to cope with genders? | ||
Tags: Gender | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| eyyamguder Diglot Newbie Turkey Joined 4860 days ago 8 posts - 14 votes Speaks: Turkish*, English Studies: French | Message 1 of 33 24 August 2011 at 2:46pm | IP Logged |
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i am trying to learn french on my own. my native language is turkish and my only foreign
language is English. so this is my first time struggling with genders. what is the best way to deal with them? am i supposed to obsessively learn them while building my vocabulary or shall i be familiar with them spontaneously as i more and more exposed to language with reading and listening? what do you suggest? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| jazzboy.bebop Senior Member Norway norwegianthroughnove Joined 5423 days ago 439 posts - 800 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian | Message 2 of 33 24 August 2011 at 3:00pm | IP Logged |
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Try checking out this.
It lists a 40 different word endings, the usual genders of words with those endings and the common exceptions. There is however an app for iPods, iPhones etc. which is simply called French Gender and it supposedly covers every single type of word ending and every exception and you can test yourself using the app as well. I have it and it is a great app but I have no way to verify if genuinely covers everything but it is extensive, userfriendly and very useful. Otherwise, the above site should help you a lot. 10 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kmart Senior Member Australia Joined 6129 days ago 194 posts - 400 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 3 of 33 24 August 2011 at 3:25pm | IP Logged |
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Always study the nouns with the indefinite article (un, une) to help you remember the gender, but don't stress over it too much. If you get lots of exposure to the language, you will become more familiar with the genders and get a feeling for correct usage.
And don't stress yourself about the "why" of it all. It just is. C'est la vie. ;-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| uuuuaaaa Newbie Poland Joined 5361 days ago 5 posts - 12 votes Studies: Finnish | Message 4 of 33 24 August 2011 at 9:42pm | IP Logged |
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Remembering Genders
In a language where gender is important, a very good method of remembering this is to divide your town into two main zones. In one zone you code information on masculine gender nouns, while in the other zone you code information on feminine nouns. Where the language has a neutral gender, then use three zones. You can separate these areas with busy roads, rivers, etc. To fix the gender of a noun, simply associate its image with a place in the correct part of town. This makes remembering genders easy! Source 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5771 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 5 of 33 24 August 2011 at 11:15pm | IP Logged |
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Coming from a language that doesn't have gender means that you might want to pay some attention to your learning strategies.
Gender is a tool to show you which words belong together in a sentence, so that you can understand it more easily. In other languages word order or other grammatical features are used for that purpose. Gender is far from being perfect for its purpose, but it seems to work well enough to not be dropped. So, because gender is a tool for linking words, it is expressed not only in the nouns it's a feature of, but also in the surrounding words. In French that those are adjectives, adverbs, pronouns and certain particles. The trick is not only to memorize that a certain word is feminine or masculine, but to learn how to comprehend the gendered parts of a sentence and also how to produce sentences with correct gender accordance. Once you have the basics of that down, it should be easy to learn new words with the correct gender, but if you don't pay attention to it first and force yourself to form sentences with accordance, you might start to ignore those bits of information rather than absorbing them. I find replacement drills (FSI style) useful to familiarize myself with grammatical features like that when starting out with a new language, and then I switch to forming my own sentences based on sentence patterns I already learnt. Edited by Bao on 24 August 2011 at 11:15pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5339 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 6 of 33 24 August 2011 at 11:48pm | IP Logged |
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I have tried to always learn the word together with the article. I never learn maison, livre, femme, lit, I learn la maison, le livre, la femme et le lit. That works for me.
Never understood the point of grammatical genders anyway. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Carlucio Triglot Groupie BrazilRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4863 days ago 70 posts - 113 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishC1, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 7 of 33 25 August 2011 at 5:05am | IP Logged |
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I think you should just memorize, if i try to understand how the prepositions work in English i would centainly get mad.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Gatsby Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6167 days ago 57 posts - 129 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Dutch | Message 8 of 33 25 August 2011 at 6:16am | IP Logged |
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[QUOTE=Bao]
"So, because gender is a tool for linking words, it is expressed not only in the nouns it's a feature of, but also in the surrounding words. In French that those are adjectives, adverbs, pronouns and certain particles. The trick is not only to memorize that a certain word is feminine or masculine, but to learn how to comprehend the gendered parts of a sentence and also how to produce sentences with correct gender accordance." Don't forget that adverbs are invariable, so there is no accordance with the gender of the noun concerned. Edited by Gatsby on 25 August 2011 at 6:19am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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