Quote:
Originally Posted by bc-chris
i'm guessing that whoever came up with the french language also had this 
i never did understand how anyone could know that your pants are masculine (le pantalon) and your socks are feminine (la chaussette) - i still don't get it! |
A lot of languages do this (Spanish, Italian, German, Arabic).
For myself, being fluent in Arabic made learning French incredibly difficult and confusing while I was in school. I would say about 70% of the nouns had the same gender in both languages, but the other 30% were totally different. On top of that, in Arabic, you can tell just from the sound of the word whether it is masculine or feminine. If it ends in a vowel sound (-ah, -eh, -i), it is feminine. Everything else is masculine. In French, it's all arbitrary.