Basics 1 (Genders, Personal Subject Pronouns, Subject-Verb Agreement)

Grammar notes like those below can be helpful if you're having trouble with the lessons, so consider trying the lessons above before reading the notes. They'll be more helpful once you have a context for understanding them.

Genders

French has two grammatical genders: masculine and feminine. All nouns have a gender that you must memorize. Sometimes, the gender can be obvious: une femme ("a woman") is feminine. Other times, it's not obvious: une pomme ("an apple") is also feminine.

There is no rule of thumb to guess a noun’s gender, so make sure you learn every noun together with its indefinite article un or une as if the article were part of the noun, like “apple” is une pomme.

Personal Subject Pronouns

In every complete sentence, the subject is the person or thing that performs an action or is being described. This is often a noun, but a personal subject pronoun (e.g. "I", "you", or "he") can replace that noun. In both English and French, pronouns have different forms based on what they replace.

Subject-Verb Agreement

Notice above that the verb manger (as well as its English equivalent, "to eat") changes form to agree grammatically with the subject. These forms are called conjugations of that verb.

Here are some conjugations for verbs you'll encounter in the first few units: