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: 
### 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)
On a more practical note, [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5iHCwiV-v7RLVRLVVZxX0xQQnM/view?pref=2&pli=1) is a cheat sheet for french gender, and [the accompanying article](http://www.languagecrawler.com/2015/06/cheat-sheet-for-learning-gender-of.html) suggests that *"glancing at this seven-page chart every once in a while helped solidify things"*.