Rule no 3: Are grammar rules hurting you

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A few months ago, a reader John emailed me asking for help.

John had spent years studying French grammar but could barely put a sentence together when faced with someone. The rules of grammar were jumbled in his head and his brain was full of random conjugations and grammar rules he wasn't sure how to use.

He felt like he had all the stepping stones to say things but couldn't really say much.

John had broken rule #3: Learn grammar in context. 

The reality is that 80% of French grammar rules are useless because there are often hundreds of exceptions to the rule.

The good news is that this means roughly 20% of grammar rules are genuinely useful because they are easy to learn and apply to 80% of sentences.

For example, according to a study by McGill University Professor Roy Lister, a noun’s ending indicates its gender in 80% of cases.

This means you don't need to "just learn each word with its gender" as many French teachers say, you can, in fact, use a simple rule to guess the gender correctly in 80% of cases.

Here is a simple rule I created based on the study:

• The majority of words that end in -e or -ion are feminine.
• Except words ending in -age, -ege, -é, or -isme that are often masculine.
• Most words with other endings are masculine.

This simple rule has already helped thousands of French learners correctly guess the gender of most of the nouns they encounter and perfectly illustrates the idea of 80/20 language learning. 

You don't need to learn all the grammar rules you stumble upon and spend hours learning conjugation tables by heart. Instead, you can just learn the 20% of rules and conjugation patterns that apply to 80% of sentences.

The rest will come naturally as you spend time listening and reading and get used to the structure of the language just like you got used to the structure of your native language.

Learning the grammar you need and ruthlessly ignoring the rest won't just save you years of frustration, it will also help you learn French much faster because you will be able to focus on speaking and communicating with locals instead of spending hours studying with dusty grammar books. 

P.S: Not following the fourth rule could easily render all your efforts useless. In fact, not following it is the reason why I miserably failed the first time I tried to master the French language. Discover the fourth rule soon.

À demain ! See you tomorrow