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

[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!