As you have noted, the most common way of doing it is to use suffixes, which sometimes indicate what gender nouns will have. You can easily find lists (with Google) such as this one which will give you suffixes and what gender they typically indicate. This second one actually includes the accuracy for each suffix, i.e. the percentage of exceptional cases.

If still undecided, other general rules can help you; though their efficiency may be better than a toss-up, they’re far from foolproof. See here and there for such examples.

Je suis Anglais, et au début, c’était très difficile de me souvenir du genre de tout les mots. Honnêtement, parce que je n’ai jamais trouvé des règles sans exceptions, je vous conseille de :

• Apprendre, avec chaque mot, le genre de ce mot aussi. Si on apprend le vocabulaire pour un contrôle, par exemple, ne pas éviter l’apprentissage des genres.
• Si on a des amis français, demandez qu’ils vous corrigent sur chaque faute de genre (si j’ai fait une faute, corrigez-moi ici aussi).

Je pense qu’il n’y a pas de meilleure méthode. Après un peu de temps, je trouvais que je me souvenais de plus en plus des mots et de leur genre correctement.

Linguistics can assist; in particular, try to find articles or papers from Linguistics.
I input gender French nouns into Google, which then revealed this (dubious) website, but which referenced this extremely informative and revealing study:

1. Predictability in French gender attribution: A corpus analysis (PDF here)
   Author:
   Roy Lyster |
   Publication date
   2006/3/1 | Journal of French Language Studies, Volume
   16, Issue
   01, Pages
   69-92, Publisher:
   Cambridge University Press

Helpfully, Google Scholars lists (50, as of 2016/1/24) Citations at the bottom of the webpage; so ensure to consult these other Citations + the references listed at the end of each resource.

At 24 pages, 1 is too long to reproduce here, but the following quote (from its Abstract (on p 1)) should already convince you of its helpfulness and motivate you to read it:

The analysis classified noun endings as reliably
masculine, reliably feminine, or ambiguous, by considering as reliable predictors
of grammatical gender any noun ending that predicts the gender of least 90 per
cent of all nouns in the corpus with that ending. Results reveal that 81 per cent of
all feminine nouns and 80 per cent of all masculine nouns in the corpus are rule
governed, having endings that systematically predict their gender. These findings,
at odds with traditional grammars, are discussed in terms of their pedagogical
implications.

I then Googled genders in french semantics which revealed other resources:

2. French gender assignment revisited, WORD, 56:1,
   19-38, DOI:
   10.1080/00437956.2005.1143255
3. Le Ou La?: The Gender of French Nouns (1995) by Marie Surridge.
   However, notice that 3 is already referenced on page 24 (of 24) of 1 above.