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Gender Issues And How To Tackle Them
by Nathalie V. Fairbanks
As a native English speaker, you have one disadvantage: you don't know about gender. It's a foreign concept to you, yet it's used in most European languages--some featuring not only two genders, but three!
Along with every noun having a gender come the fun and intricacies of articles, pronouns, adjectives and sometimes verbs that change depending on whether the noun in question is male, female or neuter, e.g. in German:
A grey cat runs down the street - Eine graue Katze rennt auf der Strasse
A grey dog runs down the street - Ein grauer Hund rennt auf der Strasse
A grey car drives down the street - Ein graues Auto faehrt auf der Strasse
As you can see, "a" and "grey" vary according to who's walking or driving...
All this to say that if you don't know if "cat," "dog" and "car" is male, female or neuter, you're in trouble. When students first realize that EVERY noun has a gender and that it's not just "cute," but that they'll have to memorize all of them, I see a look of panic on their face - "I need to do WHAT?"
So how are you supposed to remember all this?
1. Learn the rules
There are a few rules on how to recognize genders in most languages, so start off by learning these. However, for the most part, genders are arbitrary. Unless you memorize the gender with every noun, there is no way to logically deduce what it should be.
It becomes even more interesting if you are learning several languages, as genders for the same noun can differ from language to language. E.g., "cat" is masculine in French, but feminine in German, "dog" is masculine in both, and "car" is feminine in French, neuter in German. Help!
2. Use a highlighter
Help your memory along by using sensory cues. For example, go through your lesson text and mark all masculine nouns with a blue marker, feminine nouns in red or pink, neuter nouns in green. Color everything that is influenced by the gender: noun, article, adjective, possibly a pronoun. E.g. in French:
Le petit chat gris est assis sur la table de la cuisine.
[The little grey cat is sitting on the kitchen table.]
(What?? Are French cats allowed to do that?)
Color "le petit chat gris" and "assis" in blue, "la table" and "la cuisine" in red.
If you are squeamish about coloring all over your textbook, make a photocopy of your lesson text. I would recommend that anyway, as there are many other aspects of grammar that you can retain better by highlighting. It helps to have a clean copy of the text for each new topic!
3. Connect the new word to something you know is masculine, feminine or neuter
Another way to retain genders is to visualize each masculine noun along with something that you know for sure is masculine, e.g. a boy. So to remember cat in French, you visualize a little boy holding a cat. To remember neuter nouns in German, you could visualize things happening in the car (das Auto): imagine leaving a stack of money (das Geld) in the car, for example.
While this works well for nouns that represent tangible objects (things you can see and touch), it gets a little tricky when it comes to nouns for abstract concepts, such as "patience," "pride" or "time". Be creative! You can always attribute qualities to a person and imagine a patient grandma or a proud father.
4. Write masculine/feminine stories
Write a little story involving a mother and use all the feminine nouns you'd like to learn, then another one with a little boy to use all the masculine nouns. If in doubt, you'll easily remember the story and which words were included in which story. The more you can "see" the story in your head, the easier it will be to remember it... and all the words in it!
5. Learn in context... and say it out loud
Always, always learn vocabulary in context. There is nothing more inefficient than trying to retain this:
cat - chat (m)
dog - chien (m)
car - voiture (f)
If you don't have a lesson text that features the new words you are learning, make your own sentences:
Le petit chat gris est assis sur la table de la cuisine.
[The little grey cat is sitting on the kitchen table.]
(How come nobody shoved him off yet?)
Do make sure to say these sentences out loud, several times in a row. Eventually, you'll remember the gender because you'll have heard it so often that it will just "sound right." To get to that point, practice, practice, practice, then get a native speaker to record what you've written and listen, listen, listen!
© 2007 Nathalie V. Fairbanks
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