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My explanation of gendered nouns

I have noticed that there is some confusion of what gendered nouns are. I have decided to write an explanation of how I understand how the French think when talking about gendered nouns.
First of all, a noun can be thought of as something that you can put the word "the" in front of for example, the car, the woman, the emotion etc.
French has many words that can change in gender. Depending on the end of the word (and what type it is), a word can sound like it should be talked about as if it was a man or a woman. Let's look at some English words first in order to further explain what I mean:

Masculine	Feminine
Actor	Actress
Heir	Heiress
Waiter	Waitress

So as you can see, words ending in an -r sound as though it belongs to a man's group of words and -ess belongs to a woman's group of words so in a funny way, the word factor sounds like it should be under the Masculine column and the word fitness sounds like it belongs under the Feminine column. It is clear that these words have nothing to do with a man or a woman. You can talk about the fitness of a man or a woman but if we had two words for 'the' in English (one masculine and one feminine) then we would say something like 'le factor' and 'la fitness'.
This is also why the French change all their words that are able to change in gender and number to reflect upon the thing that they are talking about and not who is talking for example, a woman can say:

Tu as un stylo à me prêter ? = Do you have a pen to lend me?
J'ai un stylo noir = I have a black pen

So the French have in mind the gender and number of the thing that they are talking about regardless of who is speaking and change those words accordingly. The word "stylo" sounds as though it should be talked about as though it was a man because of how the word ends.
Taking a specific example, words ending in -age are masculine like "le garage" but of course there are exceptions such as "la page = the page" and "la nage = swimming".
Also it depends on the type of word too for example, days, months and seasons are masculine. This makes more exceptions to any rules you may have learned.
I suggest that you just look up the gender of a word when you need it. You could learn lists of masculine and feminine endings but you may get confused with the exceptions (there are exceptions to practically every rule you learn in languages).
You could also just cheat. Instead of saying a clear le / la or un / une, just touch the l or n so in the example above, "Tu as un stylo ?" could sound a bit like "tu-an-stylo ?" if said fairly quickly and in a relaxed way, or "j'ai le temp" sounds a bit like "j'ai l-temp".

Also it doesn't matter if you make mistakes; mistakes are inevitable for both novice and expert alike. The important thing are:

You enjoy using the language
You are understood

So go ahead and play with French!

Have you found an error or do you want to add more information to these pages?
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[FRANÇAIS]

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