Grammar

[Monica]

I am a student who has just joined the french immersion program. When do I use the word un and une

[Neil Coffey]

As you've probably learnt, un and une are roughly the equivalent of English a(n), or sometimes one when you're counting. So for example, pomme is the French word for "apple", and une pomme = "an apple" or, when counting, "one apple".

So in this case, why did we use une and not un? Well, all nouns of French fall into one of two categories, usually called masculine and feminine. If a word falls into the masculine category, then you use un; if it falls into the feminine category, you use une.

In general, nouns that refer to people and some common animals tend to fall into the category corresponding to the sex of the person or animal (that's why the categories are usually called "masculine" and "feminine" rather than, say, "Fred" and "Jim" or "Category A" and "Category B"). So for example:

un homme = a man
une femme = a woman
un garçon = a boy
une fille = a girl
un chien = a (male) dog
une chienne = a (female) dog, bitch
un chanteur = a male singer
une chanteuse = a female singer

But most basic words just fall arbitrarily into one of the two categories, and you just have to learn whether a particular word is masculine or feminine. There's no particular reason why an apple should be feminine: it "just is". Even with nouns referring to people/animals, there are arbitrary assignments: for example, victime is feminine, whether it refers to a male or female victim; cheval is masculine, but can refer to a male or female horse; souris is feminine, but can refer to a male or female mouse...

That said, for more complex words that are derived from suffixes or formed in particular ways, there is some system to which gender a word is assigned to. For example, every word in the language formed using the suffix -age (roughly the equivalent of English -ing, -age, -ment) is masculine.

For some common gender patterns, see the grammar page entitled "How do I tell whether to use 'le' or 'la'?", which essentially describes the same decision.