D'accord ?

So, why are Kayla and I always on your cases about agreement? Is it just that we think that we should all get along? Nope.

Agreement in French has to do with parts of speech having matching endings. Kinda of like putting the right color scarf or tie with a suit. If they don't match, well, it's kinda ugly. If it matches, well, you see how cute Shenita's nieces are together.

Actually, it's about redundancy of information. French drops lots of final sounds (beaux = /bo/) or uses apostrophes (l'école, d'accord)so if there aren't added signals in a sentence, meaning can be lost or become confusing. In a written text, with no speaker present, all that redundancy from gestures and winks, too, is lost. The written language, too, needs cues to insure meaning.

So, the agreements help you figure out who did what to whom or to what. One way is by gender agreement: articles (le/la/les/l'--un/une/des--du/de la/de l'/des/de/d') agree with adjectives agree with nouns & pronouns. Sometimes even past participles (être verbs)..

The gender issue rarely has anything to do with whether the person, place or thing is masculine or feminine. Obviously, some words are gender-specific to the sexual identity of the person or animal: l'homme, la femme, le chat, la chatte (meow-Kat for watch out, cuz 'chatte' has 'other' meanings ;-). Yet, if I say that Will (obviously one of the 'hommes' en classe) is a person, he is une personne, quite a manly personne, but still UNE personne nonetheless. Most of this gender stuff is a hangover from Greek and Latin. If it was masculine or neuter in Latin, it remained the same in French, likewise with feminine (although some neuter nouns became feminine because of the nominative plural -a form). Arabic, English, German, Peul, glottoliscious, loaners (not loners) tend to be masculine (le toubib, le smoking, le blitzkrieg, le foufou).

Big question: how do you do it properly (A+)? Take a look in the Blackboard Documents folder for my color coded explanations. To recap:
feminine article (la/une/de la/l') + feminine noun + feminine adjective (95% after noun)

• la belle fille
  
• une pièce sérieuse

masculine article (le/un/du/l') + masculine noun + masculine adjective

• du travail excellent
  
• un gros mari amusant

plurals go with plurals AND with m/f

• les belles filles
  
• des travaux excellents

Let Kayla and me know if this helps!