"Le" or "la"? Even the French can't decide
If you've ever dabbled in the French language, you know the difficulty of memorizing which gender goes with which noun. Why is a beard -- la barbe -- feminine? Why is a bicycle -- le vélo -- masculine? Well you shouldn't have to feel bad about your French language difficulties; turns out even the French can't agree on which gender goes with which word.A recent study conducted by Dalila Ayoun at the University of Arizona found that, "Fifty-six native French speakers, asked to assign the gender of 93 masculine words, uniformly agreed on only 17 of them. Asked to assign the gender of 50 feminine words, they uniformly agreed [on] only 1 of them. Some of the words had been anecdotally identified as tricky cases, but others were plain old common nouns."
Put simply, even native speakers have a hard time distinguishing between le and la. But I'm not surprised, French is after all très difficile.
Via LanguageHat
Filed under: Learning, France, Foreign Language
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Feb 29th 2008 @ 4:26PM
Olivier P. said...
Well, even worse, it's le velo but la bicyclette...
Reply
Mar 1st 2008 @ 4:56AM
Joe said...
I can understand why they can't agree. I'm taking french lessons and my professor says there is not system to feminine or masculine, you just have to know it. It might sound a little sexist but the closest I could figure is asking myself would a man or woman prefer using object. So it's le garage and la cuisine. No idea on cars, la voiture. I think it's because guys prefer to give their cars feminine names.
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Mar 1st 2008 @ 12:22PM
Heather said...
I took four years of French in High School, and Joe is right- there is no system attached to the language. You either learn it or you don't. :-)
Heather
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Mar 2nd 2008 @ 4:51PM
jon said...
Every french person I know just says use the one that feels right - some words just don't flow right (la france or le france, which trips off the tounge better?) with the wrong gender and the more you use french, the more you get a feel for this flow
Although they did tell me that foreign words in french (le piquenique, le weekend) are always masculine.
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May 12th 2008 @ 8:35PM
eric said...
Le French is a cruise ship, La France is the mother country, but even in English we use the feminine gender when we speak about boat, why?
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