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How to cope with genders? | ||
Tags: Gender | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5537 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 25 of 33 21 January 2013 at 8:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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I second songlines' recommendation of The Rules for the Gender of French Nouns. It's an excellent book (and there's even French version).
According to this article in French, even people who've lived in France for years will often have problems with gender. Apparently, much of the difficultly comes from the fact that gender markings are complex in French. (For example, you use mon in front of feminine nouns that begin with a vowel.) I think that most people will pick up a lot of noun genders automatically with enough exposure, but many adults may acquire a buggy and unreliable version of the rules. I used to be horrible at noun genders, and I've managed to get better, but I still have a long way to go. Here are some things that worked for me: 1. Stop dodging the issue. If you spend a lot of time speaking French, don't try to mumble le and la, or the endings of intelligent and intelligente. Try to pronounce these correctly and confidently, with no mumbling. This will be a royal pain in the neck until you look up a lot of genders. That's the point. (If you've never spoken enough French to activate your speech skills, I don't know whether this advice applies. Maybe you have higher priorities.) 2. Try to hear gender when people speak, and see it when you read. Quick! Did you just hear intelligente, or was it the masculine version? And sometimes when you're reading, spend a page or two working out as many genders from context as humanly possible. The goal here is to raise your awareness. Sometimes I try to imagine all the masculine nouns and adjectives appearing in baby blue, and the feminine ones in pink. 3. Learn how to figure out the gender of words by using their endings (see the book above), and learn the common exceptions. This will give you at least 75% of noun genders for free. 4. Try to work with words in context. If you know song lyrics by heart, or if you've heard some common expression so often you've memorized it, you will almost always get the gender for free. Anki cards with sentences will often help, too—you'll know a word in a phrase, and you'll pull that entire snippet out of your memory when you need it. The goal of all these exercises isn't actually to learn the gender of specific words, though that certainly helps. Instead, I'm trying to convince my brain that gender matters, and that it's not OK to ignore gender and pretend that it doesn't exist. So far, I've managed to improve dramatically, but I still have a long way to go. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5214 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 26 of 33 22 January 2013 at 5:05am | IP Logged | ||
A couple of examples from his book, in posts 6 and 9 of my log. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| AlexMoby Diglot Newbie FranceRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4317 days ago 13 posts - 15 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch | Message 27 of 33 06 February 2013 at 7:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Concerning the German genders, it could be very useful to learn the plural of the nouns in order to find out the gender.
For example, the plural of Buch is Bücher. Das ist the right gender since no feminine words have a plural in ¨-er and very few masculine words (except the words with the suffix -tum) have a plural in ¨-er (der Mann, der Gott, der Wald, der Wurm etc...) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5061 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 28 of 33 06 February 2013 at 7:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't need genders in German or French now because it's not important for reading.
But of course nouns should be learnt with articles. Edited by Марк on 06 February 2013 at 8:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5435 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 29 of 33 06 February 2013 at 8:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think the advice from @emk is excellent. As for @tastyonions idea of making an Anki stack of words without articles in order to test for articles, I feel a bit wary. But if it works...
The one comment I have to add is that the issue of grammatical gender isn't so much about the gender of the noun as the fact that so many other things in the phrase depend on gender. There are adjectives, participles and pronouns that all vary according to the the gender of the main word. Add to that complicatons with plural forms and you have a linguistic minefield that most people cannot navigate safely. I should also point out that FluentFrenchNow has a post devoted to an aspect of this very topic. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6708 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 30 of 33 07 February 2013 at 9:58am | IP Logged | ||
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I second those who have recommended always to learn substantives with an article so that you associate the noun with its gender from the beginning. However it is also true that you can't always deduce the gender from a concrete context - for instance you can't see whether l' is used with a feminine or a masculine word. The one thing you can do about it is to include an article with the word if you keep lists of the words you look up. And for those who make wordlists or flashcards/anki that should be easy enough (though unnecessary if a word clearly follows a standard rule of thumb).
For this reason I think it would be against all logic deliberately to omit this information from your anki cards. The fact the the idea even has been suggested by a wellinformed anki-ist suggests to me a fundamental flaw in the anki/flashcard idea, namely that you learn words by being controlled. For me the idea should be to present you with the facts first (if necessary several times), and the control phase should only last from the presentation of the data to your successful repetition of those data. Or in other words: it is better to read substantives with articles and then cover the words /look in another direction whil you try to recall the combination of article and substantive. We would learn languages faster if all facts always were at hand when we needed them. Edited by Iversen on 07 February 2013 at 12:40pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4627 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 31 of 33 07 February 2013 at 5:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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I always try and learn the gender along with the noun but in German there are three possibilities and you would have to be a robot to get it right all the time. Extremely common words (das Haus, der Tisch, die Mutter) don't cause problems but I do resort to guessing with some nouns. Overall, I probably select the correct gender 80% of the time and I'm happy with that.
There are tricks you can use. Most German words ending in -e take a female gender, but there are exceptions (der Hase - hare). Apparently natives never get the gender wrong, they instinctively know what is right. I'm not sure how they do that. That must mean that a gender slip will most likely identify the speaker as foreign. Edited by beano on 07 February 2013 at 5:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5435 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 32 of 33 07 February 2013 at 9:20pm | IP Logged | ||
I totally agree with @iversen on this one and I add my voice to his cautionary advice about using Anki without the gender information. On this note, I would like give the example of a book for children called Les premiers 1000 mots (Édition Cumulus). It is a translation from English. Although it is aimed at young French-speaking children, I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw that none of the words had any gender information. This is an abomination, especially if one wants to use this for second-language purposes. To be thrown in the garbage, or nearly. Edited by s_allard on 07 February 2013 at 9:43pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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