Comments on: Quelle horreur! French Speakers Can’t Agree on Genders of French Nouns

By: Sean Rasmussen

Sean Rasmussen — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 19:43:28 +0000

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, I can suggest an inexpensive app
that I’ve recently made; it helps you ‘internalize’ the ‘rules’ of identifying the gender of 95% of french nouns.

http://www.reflexarium.com

Regards,
Sean

By: Clouthhh

Clouthhh — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 03:15:10 +0000

C’est n’importe quoi, c’est des mots très facile a identifier, je crois pas que ça soit une étude sérieuse, même que d’après une normale cdf, c’est n’importe quoi! Tout le monde est capable de réponde avec un équart type de +- 2 maximum.
- Clouthhh

By: ted

ted — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 11:57:30 +0000

Inanimate objects need genders so when we’re using them as sex toys, we don’t accidentally use the wrong ones.
Those French think of everything. Imagine not knowing what gender your ass burger was…

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 06:05:34 +0000

Quelle horreur! So be it! Watch me fix this post – Voilà! It is done…

By: Lea

Lea — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 05:18:59 +0000

Nothing about “speedo” is masculine.
I’ve had the same problem with gender taking Latin and Spanish. Latin is the worst because there’s also the “Neuter” gender, which leans towards being masculine, but isn’t really.
Maybe that’s what speedo is…

By: pablo

pablo — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 09:29:22 +0000

Quelle horreur en effet! étant moi même français je trouve que It’s totaly useless.

By: Scribe

Scribe — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:09:39 +0000

I agree with Sylvain, the test is a bit strange : if only one person makes a mistake, the conclusion will be “they all disagree on this word”, which is not a really objective vision.

It’s true that on some words (I’m french too) which are not often used, we sometimes don’t know. But I think it’s the same for other languages which are using gender (spanish for example). For 99,9% of words, there is no problem at all

Jeffrey > Yes, “De l’horreur!” means quite nothing ^^ “Quelle horreur !” is much better.

By: Jeffrey_P

Jeffrey_P — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:42:01 +0000

I think that should be “Quelle horreur!”

By: Christophe

Christophe — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:47:37 +0000

Miss Celania:
Once you speak French you don’t really compute things as “feminin” or “masculin”. It does not have a real meaning.
Speedo, unfortunately, is masculine.

By: L

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:11:04 +0000

I always had trouble with this in French class. Glad to know I’m not the only one!

By: Miss Cellania

Miss Cellania — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:50:32 +0000

Why do inanimate objects need a gender?

By: Sylvain

Sylvain — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 07:59:51 +0000

No I don’t think so Ty. I’m French and after reading the article (which is the first thing to do Ty) the Alex’s article is a subjective appreciation of the original article. “Agree” in this article means that 100% of the speakers know the right gender of the noun. If “only” 97.6% answered the correct gender this article tells that “speakers don’t agree on the gender”.

Furthermore, the main goal of this article is to compare Adults vocabulary and Teenagers vocabulary, which only means that an older person knows better his native language than a younger one… I bet I could have found this between a 2 years child and a 5 years child too …

But I think that this article is a kind of consolation for english speakers as the genders are a difficult part of french language to learn.

By: ty

ty — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 07:46:01 +0000

i bet spanish speakers with french as a second language would be better able to identify the gender of those french nouns than the french themselves.