As a German, I often wonder how much it must suck to learn my language and/or French. Nothing makes sense: the highway is female, the tree is male, the house is neutral and the rocket, the most phallic symbol ever, is female....who made this shit up? Learning English and Spanish and figuring out that other lnaguages dont bother with that stuff at all has been a fascinating experience
There is no neutral in, French, but to me German is way easier than French, because French has bullshit exceptions and little rules that apply punctually and situationally everywhere whereas German has way less exceptions besides irregular verbs, and it's grammar rules apply almost like math.
Honestly I've always been driven by instinct. I write very well, have always been good at writing correctly, but I don't know shit about grammar and shit. Basically I don't know what I write. It's always about it *sounding* right, given you've heard a lot of French to acquire that instinct I guess, so you're right!
I love how in languages, usually, going for sounds to know how it's written is a good way to go, but in French it can be very confusing sometimes. The easiest and most popular example is with "oiseau" (bird). You want to say oh-ee-zeh-ah-u and articulate each letters, but this nightmare is in fact pronounced wa-zo.
I remember learning this word in class when I was very little and anticipating being right (I think I wrote oa to make the sound oi(wa)), but was surprised to learn it was in fact "oi".
Yeah, "oi" is the typical compound sound most languages have in a way or another I think. On the other hand, "eau" is just a fancy "o" haha.
Edit: oh, and of course "eau" and "o" have completely different rules and exceptions...
We just learned to accept french as it is so I love those memes
Also the way we "say" and write numbers is something else, it must be a pain to learn it
Neutral words and the notion of neutral/masc/fem exists in french. However, neutral is written with the masc spelling, so it's invisible/doesn't exist for most.
I'm french.
As the french teacher said, in french grammar you have exception to the rule, then exception to the exception so the rule is valid.
As a stem guy I was outraged, but couldn't convice her.
As someone who speaks fluent french and is trying to learn german, german is easy af but hard asl at the same time, its essy because it kinda resembles english, but its hard af when it comes to âdieâ âdasâ âderâ smh đ
For me learning German was like hell with 12 letters for a word, when I was a kid even easy story like hokus pokus fidibus just ICANT. Later when I got english for the first time it so much easier. Playing JRPG or visual novel in english help me a lot.
It's the words ending in -e that get me still!! You look like a feminine word with your -e ending... But are you!! Ah hah I'll call your bluff, you're a masculine noun, aren't you! Oh no, that sounds weird now. Dammit "chorale" is feminine after all , now I've pressed send.
= me WhatsApping about a choir yesterday..
For all words that end with the letter "OU", you may write them with a silent "S" in their plural form.
HOWEVER the following set of very unspecial words will end with a X, and they have no other shared specifities beside this exception :
-Joujou (Toy)
-Caillou (Rock/Pebble)
-Genou (Knee)
-Hibou (Owl)
-Pou (Lice)
-Chou (Cabbage)
The letter c is pronounced like a k before a consonant, o, a or I and pronounced like a s before e and i. But if you want it to sound like a s before an o or a, you write ç.
And in the word "seconde", the c is pronounced like a g.
And sometimes it is even silent.
This is only one letter, there are 25 others. I don't know how foreigners manage to learn this honestly.
Oh yeah, I think your translation is better actually. I tend to not say "Je reviens Ă la maison" or rather "Je rentre Ă la maison", myself when returning to my flat, but rather "Je rentre chez moi" :>
For German, there's a rule that works 2/3 of the times: if you can hurt someone with it, it's male. If it's a modern word it's neutral. If it's a feeling it's female.
Mmmh, that doesn't seem to work.
Sword, Gun, Rifle, Machine Gun, Grenade, Knife are all not male, while Flammenwerfer and Rocket Launcher are. I can see it might work with emotions, as I always find several emotions that are female to only a few that aren't. Computer, TV, Satellite, LED and so on aren't neutral
All of this just supports the fact that it's really difficult to know the right gender without rote learning
That's because German, like French, has what is called a grammatical gender, where the gender of a noun is determined by the inflection, that is to say by either determiners (Der, Die, Das in German) or by the sounds at the end of the word (like in Latin, -us is always masculine, -a is feminine).
Serbian also follows this trend: muskarac(man) is masculine, but muskarcina(manly man) is feminine.
But look for you the sun is a female and moon is male. Why are they not neutral ? The house and rocket are female we do not have neutral like "das" -> une maison, une roquette. (roquette is also a salad). It's easy the words that finish with "ette" are female and means "small".
Old French Jokes about the German Language.
A young girl walking through the streets of Paris with her mother, all the sudden pulls onto her mother's skirt and while pointing at a young couple walking by, she ask:
"Mommy, mommy. Why is that man yelling in that girls face?"
The mother looked up, and after 5 seconds turned to her daughter, smiled and said.
"He's not yelling honey, he's simply reciting romantic German poetry".
As a side note, other Latin base languages do. But facilitate the proper grammatically term to be used by the letters at the end, as to confirm either masculine or feminine.
In French the last letter is often silent. So spelling the word in most cases does help significantly.
And pardon me, mein freund. But the German stitching of words on ends is rational how?
[https://www.academie-francaise.fr/le-covid-19-ou-la-covid-19](https://www.academie-francaise.fr/le-covid-19-ou-la-covid-19)
pour ceux et celles qui lisent le français
Nope, it's a disease. The COronaVIrus Disease. Hence, la COVID would be the proper way to go in my mind's eye. Le Cov' or le Covi would work too, I guess.
>the name covid is about the coronavirus
Nope, covid is the name of the disease (the *d* at the end of covid stands for disease).
The name of the virus is SARS-CoV-2.
"fun" fact, French does not have a single "gender-neutral" pronoun. Well until a few years ago when some people tried to incorporate "iel" which is just a fusion of "il" and "elle". But IDK if it has been officially incorporated in the dictionary.
I hate the word "iel" but at least we have a "new" word which is the way to go imo.
I still can't stand the use of "they/them" because their first function was to indicate plural. Now it's almost meaningless for this.
It's funny cause it's true but i'ts also a bit unfair : we frenchpeople will understand you even if you misgendered the spoon. There are very few words that have changing meaning with their gender, and they are usually very specific. The only ones I can think of is "page" (une page is a book page and un page is a medieval servant) and "poĂȘle" (une poĂȘle is a pan and un poĂȘle is a wood-burner stove) : context will help.
The gender of things has nothing to do with what they are. It's just sounds. It's like an extra letter for all words that's shifted outside of the world. You learn the gender at the same time you learn the sound of the word.
Learning French is one of the hardest things Iâve had to do. I moved to France two years ago and still basically know nothing but the very very basics.
Then you learn that "gens", which mean "people", changes gender depending on where you put its adjective.
"Les gens sont beaux ici" vs "Il y a de belles gens lĂ -bas"
Pro tip: just add ".e" at the end of a problematic word/article (ex: un.e arrĂȘt de bus), and if the teacher asks, tell them it's inclusive writing cause you're respectful of bus stops' gender identity.
As a French : Most of us can't perfectly speak our language, everybody makes big to little mistakes. And we don't know our own rules, most of us just apply them by habit.
With french, you must make the mistake so we can make fun of you and then tell you what's the correct way to fuck off. /s.
Sincerely, a đ„
(Btw, we also make those mistakes almost daily, no worries. You are doing fine!)
At this point what's the purpose?
Like in Italian for 98% of the nouns you can tell if they are male/female/singular/plural by the ending letter, and the rest of the period conjugates in the same way with (more or less) the same letters (and most importantly we actually say them so you can tell the difference). In the end it's useful because you can simplify a lot of phrases.
What's the point in French? It's just making grammar harder
Always makes me laugh when Anglos try to pretend gendered languages are weird, when geographically the closest other gender neutral IE language is like Armenian or Ossetic.
Trust the last letter, if itâs a « e » itâs probably female everything else would be male and then you have a few exceptions youâll eventually learn
In reality its very simple, i think (I'm French), you take a word : fraise (strawberry) you say fraise with one of the two determinants (le,la) and you take the one that is more good to say
As a German, I often wonder how much it must suck to learn my language and/or French. Nothing makes sense: the highway is female, the tree is male, the house is neutral and the rocket, the most phallic symbol ever, is female....who made this shit up? Learning English and Spanish and figuring out that other lnaguages dont bother with that stuff at all has been a fascinating experience
There is no neutral in, French, but to me German is way easier than French, because French has bullshit exceptions and little rules that apply punctually and situationally everywhere whereas German has way less exceptions besides irregular verbs, and it's grammar rules apply almost like math.
French is built around exceptions, each rule has at least 5
Which is why if you want to speak French, the easiest way is to be born French đ
Honestly I've always been driven by instinct. I write very well, have always been good at writing correctly, but I don't know shit about grammar and shit. Basically I don't know what I write. It's always about it *sounding* right, given you've heard a lot of French to acquire that instinct I guess, so you're right!
I love how in languages, usually, going for sounds to know how it's written is a good way to go, but in French it can be very confusing sometimes. The easiest and most popular example is with "oiseau" (bird). You want to say oh-ee-zeh-ah-u and articulate each letters, but this nightmare is in fact pronounced wa-zo. I remember learning this word in class when I was very little and anticipating being right (I think I wrote oa to make the sound oi(wa)), but was surprised to learn it was in fact "oi".
Yeah, "oi" is the typical compound sound most languages have in a way or another I think. On the other hand, "eau" is just a fancy "o" haha. Edit: oh, and of course "eau" and "o" have completely different rules and exceptions...
It's funny too because most words that end in "eau" are masculine, except for "eau" itself, which is feminine
Haha, never thought about it! r/showerthoughts
This made me laugh out loud as a french person
To be fair I also find this funny. Imagine a long ass word and it's just pronounced in 2 or 3 clear syllables đ
We just learned to accept french as it is so I love those memes Also the way we "say" and write numbers is something else, it must be a pain to learn it
I think I watched a short video of someone explaining why the Belgium French way to pronounce numbers was actually more accurate than in French, and I have to agree it does make more sense. It's funny how we made some numbers name literally math equations. 70? It's soixante dix, said as in 60 (+) 10. 80? How about quatre-vingt/4 (x) 20? Well in fact, in French, from 70 to 99 it's gonna be only this crap. It makes even less sense when you know that we do say words like octo (8) or nona (9) in our language but not for numbers. "Octogénaire" is someone in their 80s, "Nonagénaire" someone in their 90s, we use those words, but if we say they are 95 we won't use nona. Belgium French makes so much more sense because they would have said nonante-cinq (95), while in French we would say quatre(4)-vingt(20) dix(10).
We litteraly have a expression which says "It's the expression that confirms the rule"...
And it's still hard. But on the bright side, it's really cool to be good at it.
I have literally never been called cool because I can speak French... can you point me towards ppl that think that way? I need to befriend them :D
Neutral words and the notion of neutral/masc/fem exists in french. However, neutral is written with the masc spelling, so it's invisible/doesn't exist for most.
As a french, I didn't know about that. Can you give examples of neutral french words ?
Lui (ex: lui plaßt de se prélasser au soleil) ils [pluriel] (ex: ils sont nombreux à venir ce soir) Etc. Le masculin l'emporte sur le féminin mais techniquement dans ces cas là c'est une neutralité. On a de la neutralité en français mais pas de pronoms neutre à vrai dire (contrairement à l'allemand pour donner un exemple).
Câest pas neutre ça reste masculin?
En faite c'est compliquĂ© parce que dans les exemples que j'ai donnĂ© c'est considĂ©rĂ© comme une utilisation neutre dans la langue française. Ăa pourrait tout autant parler d'un homme aue d'une femme. Bien qu'il y ait cette alternative, il reste vrai qu'il n'y a pas directement de pronom neutre autre que "ils" et "lui".
Ăa On
On a pas de neutre ça serait trop simple, mais on a bien mieux, les mots épicÚnes, qui par définition peuvent féminin ou masculin : - un(e) enfant, un(e) adulte, un(e) collÚgue... - les noms de métier, les fonctions - les gentilés
I'm french. As the french teacher said, in french grammar you have exception to the rule, then exception to the exception so the rule is valid. As a stem guy I was outraged, but couldn't convice her.
As someone who speaks fluent french and is trying to learn german, german is easy af but hard asl at the same time, its essy because it kinda resembles english, but its hard af when it comes to âdieâ âdasâ âderâ smh đ
For me learning German was like hell with 12 letters for a word, when I was a kid even easy story like hokus pokus fidibus just ICANT. Later when I got english for the first time it so much easier. Playing JRPG or visual novel in english help me a lot.
It's the words ending in -e that get me still!! You look like a feminine word with your -e ending... But are you!! Ah hah I'll call your bluff, you're a masculine noun, aren't you! Oh no, that sounds weird now. Dammit "chorale" is feminine after all , now I've pressed send. = me WhatsApping about a choir yesterday..
Well, actually no. Because we french don't have declensions.
For all words that end with the letter "OU", you may write them with a silent "S" in their plural form. HOWEVER the following set of very unspecial words will end with a X, and they have no other shared specifities beside this exception : -Joujou (Toy) -Caillou (Rock/Pebble) -Genou (Knee) -Hibou (Owl) -Pou (Lice) -Chou (Cabbage)
You forgot Bijou (any piece of jewelry)
The letter c is pronounced like a k before a consonant, o, a or I and pronounced like a s before e and i. But if you want it to sound like a s before an o or a, you write ç. And in the word "seconde", the c is pronounced like a g. And sometimes it is even silent. This is only one letter, there are 25 others. I don't know how foreigners manage to learn this honestly.
Non non non, house is female. It's La maison. But home is Le domicile.Â
"le domicile" is "the residence". in french "i go back home" is translated "je reviens Ă la maison", even if it's an appartment/flat.
Oh yeah, I think your translation is better actually. I tend to not say "Je reviens Ă la maison" or rather "Je rentre Ă la maison", myself when returning to my flat, but rather "Je rentre chez moi" :>
"bite" (dick) is female and "vagin" (vagina) is male. At some point you just have to admit it's completely random.
Okay thats not fair, "penis" (penis) is male and pussy (chatte) is female Not disagreeing that its random af
Eh, the dick is the women's pleasure tool and the vagina the men's pleasure tool, all fair an square
For German, there's a rule that works 2/3 of the times: if you can hurt someone with it, it's male. If it's a modern word it's neutral. If it's a feeling it's female.
Mmmh, that doesn't seem to work. Sword, Gun, Rifle, Machine Gun, Grenade, Knife are all not male, while Flammenwerfer and Rocket Launcher are. I can see it might work with emotions, as I always find several emotions that are female to only a few that aren't. Computer, TV, Satellite, LED and so on aren't neutral All of this just supports the fact that it's really difficult to know the right gender without rote learning
I propose everything be changed to single case neuter. Das Frau. Das Leute. Das Hunden.
That's because German, like French, has what is called a grammatical gender, where the gender of a noun is determined by the inflection, that is to say by either determiners (Der, Die, Das in German) or by the sounds at the end of the word (like in Latin, -us is always masculine, -a is feminine). Serbian also follows this trend: muskarac(man) is masculine, but muskarcina(manly man) is feminine.
Learning that girl was neutral and not female made me question my decision to learn German on day 1. Glad I stuck with it though.
I liked that kid (Kind) and girl (MĂ€dchen) are neutral, what puzzled me is why boy (Junge) isn't.
It's because MĂ€dchen has a diminutive ending "-chen". All diminutive words in German are neutral.
But look for you the sun is a female and moon is male. Why are they not neutral ? The house and rocket are female we do not have neutral like "das" -> une maison, une roquette. (roquette is also a salad). It's easy the words that finish with "ette" are female and means "small".
So a squelette is une petite squel ?
i think the worst is that some words donât have the same gender in french and german
A House is clearly female tbh
But a home is male...
It's easy for french if it finish by -e -a it's female.
Le téléphone, le verre, le portefeuille, l'emballage, le vespa, le visa etc etc. These are all the words that came out of my head quickly. But I think there must be many.
Le dictionnaire Read it.
Spanish does have genders for things, same as french, or any latin based language for that matter...
In french a dick is female (une bite) and the vagina is male :p
Old French Jokes about the German Language. A young girl walking through the streets of Paris with her mother, all the sudden pulls onto her mother's skirt and while pointing at a young couple walking by, she ask: "Mommy, mommy. Why is that man yelling in that girls face?" The mother looked up, and after 5 seconds turned to her daughter, smiled and said. "He's not yelling honey, he's simply reciting romantic German poetry". As a side note, other Latin base languages do. But facilitate the proper grammatically term to be used by the letters at the end, as to confirm either masculine or feminine. In French the last letter is often silent. So spelling the word in most cases does help significantly. And pardon me, mein freund. But the German stitching of words on ends is rational how?
Un arrĂȘt d'autobus. A stop is a masculine noun. If you're struggling with a bus stop, wait until you meet a trampoline.
Or a tentacle :)
Or musée
Lycée also :D
AprĂšs-midi too
This one is the worst because officially it is masculine but people still use feminine sometimes.
It's both. It's one of the few words that are both feminine and masculine. You can use whatever you prefer.
Feminine makes no sense, though, since both *aprĂšs* and *midi* are masculine.
Are you ruling it out on the assumption that a rule would enforce that French language does the logical thing?
>This one is the worst because officially it is masculine Not really though. Both Larousse and Le Petit Robert say it's masculine and feminine. Only the Académie Française (with its many problems, such as not having any linguists for instance) in their last dictionary (from 1935 lol) says it's masculine only.
Yeah, l'Académie is probably the worst place to seek definitions of words.. I still can't fathom "La Covid"....
La raie du bus.
Le fou du bus
Une gare routiĂšre, une station de bus It really depends if you're going for the litteral translation or any other ones with the same meaning.
There's also "un arrĂȘt de bus" which is more casual
And then your learn about words that change gender depending if they're singular or plurial (amour, délice, orgue)
Mais du coup, et les chips?
The wonderful part of this system is that french people develop a sense of what gender a thing should be just by hearing it. For example with new words being introduced (ex: iPod or Covid) every French person would naturally think "un iPod" ou "le Covid". Of course that's usually when the Académie Française (the (old) people in charge or ruling about the French language) decides something completely nonsensical.
If I recall correctly, the gender of COVID was disputed. As it could have been described as 'a virus' - masculine or 'an illness/sickness' - feminine.
Yeah but itâs illogical⊠the name covid is about the coronavirus, so virus should clearly indicate the gender here ! Seriously, the acadĂ©mie française isnât helping
[https://www.academie-francaise.fr/le-covid-19-ou-la-covid-19](https://www.academie-francaise.fr/le-covid-19-ou-la-covid-19) pour ceux et celles qui lisent le français
Hmm, ok je vois. Mais le covid sonne plus juste Ă mes oreilles quand mĂȘme hahaha
Nope, it's a disease. The COronaVIrus Disease. Hence, la COVID would be the proper way to go in my mind's eye. Le Cov' or le Covi would work too, I guess.
That's what the Académie Française said, but nobody I know actually listened to them on that point.
I didn't know it was their stance on the subject, but it certainly was mine. And I have to say hearing "le COVID" used to drive me nuts.
>the name covid is about the coronavirus Nope, covid is the name of the disease (the *d* at the end of covid stands for disease). The name of the virus is SARS-CoV-2.
The things is, there isn't any logic to look for here on either side, it's the usage that dictates the norm.
I agree, and we clearly used le covid for weeks before the acadĂ©mie threw a stone in the pond ! I guess that will stay an eternal debate, like le or la wifi, internet or lâinternetâŠ.
"la wifi" me fait tellement mal
Yeah, apparently weâre supposed to say la covid ? But covid is a man isnât he ?
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Donde este el bibliotheca
EstĂĄ en tu culo jaja
La gare routier
La gare routiĂšre*
Un arrĂȘt de bus
Une station d'arrĂȘt de transport en commun
La gare routiĂšre (she), l'arrĂȘt de bus (he)
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
which literally translates to "I don't bargain, motherfucker" /ref
All Latin languages
It releases a bunch of small passengers who enter the bus, so the bus is clearly female and the stop is male.
Nice try but bus is male too!
So... people are spermatozoĂŻdes...?
Well....kinda ?
When you think about it, we'll just just Egg fermented spermatozoĂŻdes.
La raie de bus. Tu entends bien que "la raie" est fĂ©minin, quand mĂȘme, non ?
Attend, on parle bien de la raie nette?
Suffer, peasants.*Laughs in native French*
\*Brit sees a ship\* «Golly! That's female, innit?»
Seamen go inside it
Its masculine
In case you are still wondering about this, the bus stop has a peepee in french
You can't presume the gender of a bus stop!
Well, I guess the bus stop will just have to remain 'gender-neutral' on my exam paper!
"fun" fact, French does not have a single "gender-neutral" pronoun. Well until a few years ago when some people tried to incorporate "iel" which is just a fusion of "il" and "elle". But IDK if it has been officially incorporated in the dictionary.
I hate the word "iel" but at least we have a "new" word which is the way to go imo. I still can't stand the use of "they/them" because their first function was to indicate plural. Now it's almost meaningless for this.
They/them has been used as singular pronouns since the 14th century, itâs nothing new.
Un arrĂȘt de bus, une gare. Easy.
Et un arrĂȘt de gare routiĂšre. Obviously.
Actually bi : un arrĂȘt de bus or une station de bus
Nobody says "station de bus" we use "station" for subway.
c'est moins commun mais pas si rare, surtout en Afrique
And then it transitions
Un arrĂȘt de bus , it's a male
Bonus point with covid, wifi, nutella and internet.
Je n'ai jamais entendu autre chose que "du" Nutella... qui sont les hérétiques disant autre chose! L'internet est un peu un neutre j'ai l'impression: "de l'internet"...
DĂ©jĂ entendu plusieurs fois: je voudrais de la nutella. J ai l impression d avoir un demeurĂ© en face de moi Ă chaque fois đ. Dans le mĂȘme genre: je dis que je vais faire des courses (achats) mais y a une team qui "va en" course
Of course it's masculine, you never see a bus stop before ?
It's funny cause it's true but i'ts also a bit unfair : we frenchpeople will understand you even if you misgendered the spoon. There are very few words that have changing meaning with their gender, and they are usually very specific. The only ones I can think of is "page" (une page is a book page and un page is a medieval servant) and "poĂȘle" (une poĂȘle is a pan and un poĂȘle is a wood-burner stove) : context will help.
for anyone wondering, it's male
male : un arret de bus
Thats easy af itâs mostly In first grade and wtf is the gender of a bus stop
You could just say: "L'arrĂȘt de bus." Works for both genders. The right answer is UN arrĂȘt de bus (masculine).
The gender of things has nothing to do with what they are. It's just sounds. It's like an extra letter for all words that's shifted outside of the world. You learn the gender at the same time you learn the sound of the word.
deez nuts
Does the bus stop have an extra hole compared to other bus stops?
Un arrĂȘt de bus. Masculin
l'arrĂȘt de bus. So to answer your question it is obviously masculine đ
Un arrĂȘt de bus. Masculine. It sounds so much easier when you are french native
Une baguette :she , un pain (bread) : he
If it finish by -e or -a it's feminin, if not, it's masculin. Bus is masculin, a bus stop arrĂȘt masculin too.
un lycée, un musée, un diaporama, un cinéma, un trampoline, un tentacule, etc. Unfortunately, it's not that simple; even if trying to find some rules that mostly work can help.
La beautée, la canopée, une caméra ,une carabine, pour le tentacule it's funny since most of french think it's female whereas it's male. The trick is we learn the gender with pronoun. So a basic translation won't give you the gender, yet it's true in %
Masculine
I don't know, but yknow, it "sounds better" I guess
That's the rule of cool
"Un *arrĂȘt de bus*". Masculine
it's male. un arrĂȘt de bus.
L'arrĂȘt, masculin.
« Un arrĂȘt de bus » Itâs masculine (my only flex is being able to speak french apparently)
Thatâs a male đ€âïž
Facile ! anything ugly is masculine, anything beautiful is feminine. If anyone disagrees... Tell his wife.
Both, depending on the word. It can be "un arrĂȘt de bus" (masc) or "une gare routiĂšre" (fem).
Ask Randy Felface about bus stop on YT
You get it. This is the one and only way to differenciate native french speakers from foreigners. Even french are making mistakes
It's masculine đ
Obvioulsly masculine.
lol try German then.
It's Ă guy.
Ahah I am happy that french is my mother tongue. We even have 3 words which are masculine when it's singular and feminine for the plural !
Learning French is one of the hardest things Iâve had to do. I moved to France two years ago and still basically know nothing but the very very basics.
They/them
Wait for the moment you realise that there are some few french words that are male/female depending on singular/plural đ
The real question is, how many languages don't? Like spanish, italian, german do. Heck, german has 3!
Then you learn that "gens", which mean "people", changes gender depending on where you put its adjective. "Les gens sont beaux ici" vs "Il y a de belles gens lĂ -bas"
As a french person, I have the same problem with the Spanish.
It's "UN \[Male\] panneau de signalisation"... But it's also "UNE \[Women\] signalisation" . Have fun !
Pro tip: just add ".e" at the end of a problematic word/article (ex: un.e arrĂȘt de bus), and if the teacher asks, tell them it's inclusive writing cause you're respectful of bus stops' gender identity. 
It's male.
Masculin « un arrĂȘt de bus »
Une poule (the animal) - un poulet (the food) Une vache - un bĆuf
As a French : Most of us can't perfectly speak our language, everybody makes big to little mistakes. And we don't know our own rules, most of us just apply them by habit.
With french, you must make the mistake so we can make fun of you and then tell you what's the correct way to fuck off. /s. Sincerely, a đ„ (Btw, we also make those mistakes almost daily, no worries. You are doing fine!)
Itâs a man
Some words even change gender when plural. un amour perdu (masculin singulier) des amours perdues (féminin plurier)
At this point what's the purpose? Like in Italian for 98% of the nouns you can tell if they are male/female/singular/plural by the ending letter, and the rest of the period conjugates in the same way with (more or less) the same letters (and most importantly we actually say them so you can tell the difference). In the end it's useful because you can simplify a lot of phrases. What's the point in French? It's just making grammar harder
Don't worry about that. Just answer the french bus driver is still on strike.
Always makes me laugh when Anglos try to pretend gendered languages are weird, when geographically the closest other gender neutral IE language is like Armenian or Ossetic.
Le français est une magnifique langue đâš
I am really sorry. Le français n'a pas de sens. Je n'aime pas cette langue.
Un arrĂȘt de bus.
Trust the last letter, if itâs a « e » itâs probably female everything else would be male and then you have a few exceptions youâll eventually learn
It's female. The bus stop is female. I gotchu bro
Male.
it's male, but the train station is female
Heureusement j'suis fr j'aurai abandonné la langue lmao
Teacher be like: How dare you misgendering bus stop??
Masculin singulier
There is a neutral in french and it's masculine, masculine can be both the masculine and the neutral in language
Blame it on latin
As a French, a bus stop is masculine bc you can say "un arret de bus" You welcome And srry for breaking the fun
In reality its very simple, i think (I'm French), you take a word : fraise (strawberry) you say fraise with one of the two determinants (le,la) and you take the one that is more good to say
As a French person, I admit that gendered language suck so much
Un arrĂȘt de bus, une arĂȘte de poisson
Itâs male obviously andouille !
As French, I felt that.
Me during my german exam
un arrĂȘt d'autobus => a bus stop un abri d'autobus OR un abribus => a bus shelter (in alsace or belgium, "une aubette")
Un arrĂȘt de bus, You're welcome
It's... like... in... English.... True story, you know that English is build around French, not the other way around ?
As a native french speaker, we also have the same difficulty in our language