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The Le & La of French: It’s a gender thing

Like many languages, French contains masculine and feminine words.

(That’s right! The masculine words are rough ‘n tough and the feminine words display a better attitude towards personal grooming. Or vice versa.)

The definite article “The” and the indefinite article “A” are identified as follows:

The masculine The is written as Le.

The feminine The is written as La.

The masculine A is written as Un.

The feminine A is written as Une.

Class dismissed.

Please read these bits care-full-lee

Our phrase book uses phonetics to ensure correct pronunciation.

We’ve hyphen-a-ted the phonetics of most words of more than one syllable, to make them easier to pro-nounce.

Phrase books and phonetics will never give you perfect vowel sounds, intonation, stress, length of words, emphasis, etc.

However…I’ve found that if someone hears you’re at least trying to speak their language, in most cases you’ll achieve Instant! respect.

If you get a word wrong, most people will correct your pronunciation. Dialogue begins, barriers come down, smiles reign and phonetic pennies may even fall from heaven.