French B
From Ibstudy
French B is one of the IB Group 2 subjects.
I did not write this guide - it was posted by Elric on ibscrewed.net but I thought it was extremely helpful (I even used it to help some kids I was tutoring) so I'm posting it here:
Contents |
Articles, Noms, Pronoms, et Adjectifs
Le genre
All nouns in French have two genders: masculine and feminine. We place le, un before a masculine noun and la, une before a feminine noun, e.g.
le garçon
la fille
Note:
i. Masculine
- Nouns ending in –age and –ment tend to be masculine, e.g.
le message
le sentiment
- Nouns ending with a consonant are sometimes masculine, e.g.
le restaurant
le chocolat
ii. Feminine
- Nouns ending in –ure, -sion, -tion, -ence, -ance, -té, -ette , -n, -e, -de, -ble, -esse, etc. tend to be feminine, e.g.
la couverture
la vision
la vérification
la conférence
la balance
la compatibilité
la cassette
la main
la forme
la méthode
la noblesse
iii. Both masculine & feminine : Add “e” at the end to obtain the feminine form of some nouns:
l’ami – l’amie
le français – la française Of course there are exceptions and you must memorise the gender that go with each noun.
Note: Some nouns have different meanings in masculine and feminine forms:
le livre (book) vs la livre (pound)
le rose (colour rose) vs la rose (flower)
le page (pageboy) vs la page (page)
Note: It is necessary to memorise nouns that have irregular endings for masculine & feminine nouns, e.g.
le vendeur – la vendeuse
l’étranger – l’étrangère
l'italien – l'italienne etc.
Le nombre
We pluralise a noun by adding “s” to the end of the noun, e.g.
le jour – les jours
For a noun that already ends with “s”, keep it as it is:
le français – les français
L’article défini
The French definite articles “le” and “la” are equivalent to the English definite article “the”.
le and la becomes l’ before a vowel, e.g. l’ami, l’écriture
Before a plural noun, le and la become les, e.g. les trucs, les écoles
Les formes contractées
à le – au
à les – aux
de le – du
de les – des
