French B

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French B is one of the IB Group 2 subjects.

Contents

Articles, Noms, Pronoms, et Adjectifs

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:

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

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