Random memory

[pne]

In a French test, I was unsure of the gender of vélo (bicycle).

I decided to ask the teacher, who said that he couldn't very well tell me, as that was part of the point of tests... but that there was a synonym in French for that word, and vélo had the opposite gender from that synonym.

So I thought... ah, la bicyclette (obviously feminine due to the -ette ending), wrote down le vélo, and got it right.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

interesting

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Little tricks like these are sometimes the only means by which I can remember some arbitrary gender assignments. I don't know what I'd do if each piece of silverware (knife, fork, and spoon) didn't have a different gender in German, since memorising this bit of trivia is all that helps me keep them straight. (And I still have trouble sometimes remember which is the masculine utensil, since Messer looks so much like an agent noun and Löffel like an instrument. Basically, I have to memorise another hint, which is that Messer is the opposite of what I think it should be.)

[nondescript.livejournal.com]

When I took French in high school, I used rote memorization to retain the genders of nouns. Before I read the end of your entry, I was going to blurt out "un velo" (with the acute accent, of course). I guess I remember slightly more French than I thought I did!