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Post by canadamike on Feb 6, 2009 4:43:46 GMT -5
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Post by raymondo on Feb 6, 2009 4:50:57 GMT -5
The creator says noir so noir it is!
As an aside, on the subject of gender in French, my first two years in France were a struggle from that point of view. Then someone suggested learning new nouns with an adjective that has different sounding feminine and masculine forms. From that day on, it fell into place much more easily.
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Post by PatrickW on Feb 6, 2009 7:22:45 GMT -5
Raymondo,
I don't really speak any French, and so I've never done a lot to learn the gender of nouns, but it seems to me there are a few basic spelling rules that help a lot. I'm taking French class now (I'm in the second year), which is why this thread caught my attention...
Spanish is easy! Words that end in o are masculine and a are feminine. There are a few exceptions, and of course some words end in other letters, but that really covers the bulk of nouns. Speaking a little Spanish makes it a lot easier to learn French, because they are very similar.
Dutch is something completely different! In Dutch, rather than masculine and feminine, they have 'de' words (a common gender, words that are either masculine or feminine) or 'het' words (words without gender or nuder). This means you only have to concern yourself if an object has some inherent gender or not, and mostly this follows common rules of logic. For example, if you have an egg, you can perhaps see there's a reproductive process behind it and while you may not know if that particular egg is masculine or feminine, you can guess that probably an egg is something with gender and so it's a 'de' word. Likewise, if you have a house, you might think of it as just a big stone structure and no possibility of association with gender and realize it's a 'het' word. There are of course exceptions, and it's easy to make mistakes, but you can rationalize many words this way.
Actually Dutch is so different from Spanish and French that I find it really confusing to try to use them at the same time. It's really a handicap that all of the French classes in my neighborhood are taught with Dutch as the base language!
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Post by pugs on Feb 6, 2009 11:05:22 GMT -5
Thank you orflo.
Noir it is.
Martin, you have it right.
I'm off to update my tomato list with the correct spelling.
Pugs
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