Purpose

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to correctly agree French adjectives in gender and number with the nouns they describe.

Lesson Explanation

French adjectives must agree in gender and number with the noun they describe — a rule with no equivalent in English, where “tall” stays “tall” regardless of the noun.

Most adjectives add -e for the feminine (if they don’t already end in -e) and -s for the plural: grand → grande → grands → grandes (tall, masc./fem./masc.pl./fem.pl.).

Many adjectives have genuinely irregular feminine forms that must be learned individually: beau → belle (beautiful), nouveau → nouvelle (new), blanc → blanche (white), bon → bonne (good) — note the doubled consonant pattern in several of these, a spelling change beyond simply adding “-e.”

A genuinely important word-order difference from English, though genuinely more flexible than in Spanish/Italian from earlier-built Gabal courses: most descriptive French adjectives come AFTER the noun (une voiture rouge, a red car), but a small, frequently used group of short, common adjectives comes BEFORE the noun instead — often remembered by the acronym “BAGS” (Beauty, Age, Goodness, Size): un beau livre (a beautiful book), une vieille maison (an old house), un bon repas (a good meal), une grande ville (a big city).

A few adjectives genuinely change meaning depending on position: un homme grand (a tall man) versus un grand homme (a great man) — placement here carries real semantic weight, not just style.

Practice Questions