The system
One word carries two facts. So it gets two channels.
maison is a noun, and it is feminine. A single colour cannot say both without becoming a colour for every possible combination. So colour does one job and text style does the other.
Channel one
Colour = what it does
The role the word plays in the sentence. Verbs green, nouns orange, pronouns blue, and so on down the list.
Je voudrais un café
Channel two
Style = gender
Masculine is bold. Feminine is slanted. Plural adds an underline on top of either. It works in black and white, which is the point.
le caféla maisonles filles
Prove it to yourself
Switch the colour off. The gender is still perfectly legible.
The full legend
Adapted from the Okabe–Ito palette, chosen because it stays distinguishable across the common colour-vision differences.
Verb
GreenAn action or a state — what is happening.
suis · ai · veux · voudrais
Noun
OrangeA thing, a person or a place.
café · maison · fils · famille
Adjective
PurpleDescribes a noun.
petit · grande · bon · française
Adverb
GoldModifies a verb or an adjective.
bien · beaucoup · vite
Article
Greythe / a / some — and possessives like mon, ma.
le · la · un · une
Pronoun
BlueStands in for a noun — I, you, he, it.
je · tu · il · nous
Preposition
BrownLinks words together — to, in, of, for.
à · en · de · dans
Conjunction
TealJoins two parts of a sentence.
et · mais · ou · donc
Question word
MagentaOpens a question — where, when, how, why.
où · quand · comment · pourquoi
Fixed chunk
Grey, in bracketsLearn it whole. Do not take it apart.
[s'il vous plaît] · [ça va] · [au revoir]
Read one properly
Je m'appelle David et j'habite à Wateringbury.
My name is David and I live in Wateringbury.
Subject, verb, place — the structure shows up as blue, green, brown before you have translated anything.
Nine colours, four weeks
Nobody learns nine colours at once. Two a week means the palette is familiar by the time it is complete.
- Week 1NounVerbPronounFixed chunkFour colours. Enough to see a subject, a verb and a thing.
- Week 2ArticlePrepositionArticles arrive, and with them the gender styles.
- Week 3AdjectiveQuestion wordDescription and questions.
- Week 4AdverbConjunctionThe last two. The full palette is now in play.
Why it works
You parse before you translate
Colour hands you the skeleton of the sentence — who is doing what — before the meaning has arrived. Translation becomes filling in a structure you can already see.
Gender gets three cues
The article, the style and the colour all encode the same fact. Redundant encoding is the single most reliable memory trick there is, and it matters more, not less, as you get older.
Errors become visible
un maison puts a bold article in front of a slanted noun. The clash registers as wrong before the grammar rule has been consciously recalled.
Chunks stay whole
s'il vous plaît sits inside grey brackets so you never dissect it. Three words become one item, and your working memory gets the difference back.
Accessibility, built in rather than bolted on
- The palette is Okabe–Ito based, designed to stay distinguishable for red-green and blue-yellow colour-vision differences.
- Gender is never carried by colour alone. Style and the written article carry it independently, so the system survives greyscale, photocopying and colour blindness.
- Two deliberate departures from the printed legend. The published hex values were chosen as fills, not as text on a pale ground — the orange lands near 2.6:1 there, which is not readable. Every colour here keeps its hue and has been darkened until it clears 4.4:1 on paper. Dark mode uses lifted versions of the same hues.
- Gold and orange sit at almost the same hue, so adverbs also carry a dotted underline — the second cue the colour-coding document itself recommends when two colours are hard to tell apart. Colour is never the only thing distinguishing two roles.
- Text size is adjustable site-wide from the settings panel, and every interactive element works from the keyboard.