Question: In French, some nouns are considered male and some female (le/la). Is there a way which can help me understand which grammatical gender to use with which noun?

Answer: 
You can't, really
-----------------

As I was learning French (English is my first language) the idea of gender of objects can be difficult to grasp. Genders are pretty much arbitrary and is something you just have to remember with each word (this means remembering it as *"une fenêtre"* rather than *"fenêtre"*).

You can also always listen for a [*liaison*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liaison_(French)). But usually when speaking with a fluent speaker this can be quite subtle, and difficult to listen to.

General Rules
-------------

That said, they are *some general* patterns which can be used to distinguish the gender of a noun but these **are not rules**, and are only generally followed:

* Things originating in France *tend* to be feminine. e.g. `une crêpe`, or `une pizza`
* Things originating in America *tend* to be masculine e.g. `Un burger`

**BIG DISCLAIMER:** These **are not rules at all**, these are just observations I have made.

---

### Spelling

Nouns ending in the following tend to be masculine:

* `ge`
* `le` (that aren't `-lle`, `-ole`, `-ale`, or `-ule`)
* `me`
* `re` (that isn't `-ure`)
* `phe`
* `age` source: @bleh

Nouns ending in the following tend to be feminine:

* `on`
* `é`
* `eur`

[[source]](http://www.languageguide.org/french/grammar/gender/rule.html)

Feminine nouns tend to have `e` at the end too but *many* masculine nouns also have `e` at the end

---

While some genders *tend* to have certain endings, there isn't any definite cut and dry to determine the gender of a word without memorizing it. You *can* memorize some common endings though to make better guesses. [This question on French.SE](https://french.stackexchange.com/q/2616/7385) might provide more information on this.
### Yes; rules exist, but they predict gender mostly with at least 80% (but not 100%) accuracy.To see what the rules are, please see the Linguistics papers below.

[The other answer here](https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/a/45/90) troubles me because it does not state all the detailed rules discovered in the Linguistics papers below, and so may discourage French learners from benefitting from rules discovered by linguists by possibly misleading them into losing hope and relying on only memorisation.

May I repeat my answer to [a similar question on FSE](https://french.stackexchange.com/a/16778/1995):
See

* [*Predictability in French gender attribution:
A corpus analysis* by Roy Lyster](http://personnel.mcgill.ca/files/roy.lyster/Lyster2006_JFLS.pdf)

I quote from the last paragraph (from p 22 of the PDF of 24 pages above) which answers your question more optimistically:

> 
>   Gender attribution rules based on noun endings, given their reliability and
> systematicity, are worthy of more attention in French reference books and French
> L2
> classrooms. The foregoing corpus-based study confirmed that predictive rules for
> gender attribution do exist and apply to as many as
> 80
> per cent of the nearly
> 10,000
> nouns included in the analysis. More importantly, classroom studies have demonstrated that gender attribution rules are both teachable and learnable. Regardless of
> age, L2
> learners can benefit from form-focused instructional activities that promote
> awareness of gender attribution rules and that provide opportunities for practice
> in associating grammatical gender with orthographic representations of constituent
> rhymes of literally thousands of nouns—both animate and inanimate alike.
> 
> 
> 

* [*Adult L2 Acquisition of French
Grammatical Gender:
investigating
sensitivity to phonological and
morphological gender cues*](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Ecsisso/docs/honoursThesis.pdf)