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What is the capital of Tunisia?

Genders in French: When not sure, always go with masculine?

First, French has no third gender for neutral. Grammatically, if something has no gender, the masculine will be used. So if there is no noun, you will make your sentence masculine. Let’s have a look at your examples one by one:


Exemple 1: [Le shopping/Vivre avec la peur au ventre] est fatigant

You see that “shopping” is masculine, as most English words are. And the nominal group “Vivre avec la peur au ventre” has no gender, so is masculine.


Exemple 2: Les nouvelles sont très mauvaises
J’ai une très mauvaise nouvelle à vous annoncer

Here, “nouvelle” is feminine, so “mauvaise” agrees with the noun.


Exemple 3a: “Je suis mangé du pain” est faux
La phrase “Je suis mangé du pain” est fausse

Here, you have both cases. If there is no noun, then it’s masculine.
If you say “la phrase”, then there is a gender, because “la phrase” is feminine.


Exemple 3b: [Il est/c’est] plus précis de dire “J’ai mangé du pain”
La phrase “J’ai mangé du pain” est plus précise
Plus précisément, on devrait dire “J’ai mangé du pain”

The first “il” is neutral. The first two sentences follow the same rule as the previous example (about “faux”).
Also “précis(e)” does not really seem to fit here, but saying “plus précisément” sound more natural, saying you are giving more details about what you just said before.

Random’s answer is a good explaination about the neutral gender. There is another particularity in french language: le masculin l’emporte sur le féminin (masculine is stronger than feminine). It means that if an adjective qualifies both a masculine (or neutral) and feminine word, it must be masculine. Examples

  • cette vache est blanche (vache is feminine, so is blanche)
  • ce cheval est blanc (cheval is masculine, so is blanc)
  • cette chèvre et cette vache sont blanches (both chèvre and vache are feminine => blanches is plural feminine)
  • ce cheval et cette vache sont blancs

In last sentence, cheval is masculine and vache is feminine. The adjective blancs is plural (2 animals) and masculine because le masculin l’emporte sur le féminin.

 

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What is the capital of Tunisia?