Noun gender

French moved its gender information off the noun and into the words around it, so chose and temps tell you nothing on the surface. Learn la chose and le temps as single chunks from day one, because the gender then echoes through the article, the adjective and the pronoun you reach for later.

Chanteur becomes chanteuse and danseur becomes danseuse - the everyday, productive pattern. But acteur becomes actrice and directeur becomes directrice, a smaller, more formal -teur set built on Latin roots. A rule of thumb helps: if swapping -eur for -ant gives a real present participle (chanter, chantant), expect -euse; still learn the common pairs by name.

Un élève, une élève. Un touriste, une touriste. A whole class of person nouns keeps one identical spelling for both genders - only the article, or the pronoun that replaces it, says whether you mean a man or a woman.

French nouns rarely show their gender, but a few endings do it reliably. Words in -tion, -sion, -té and -ure are feminine; words in -age, -ment and -eau are masculine. Learn the famous exceptions by name: la plage, la page, l'image, l'eau, la peau and l'été.