It’s a rare example of English being simpler than other languages, so I’m curious if it’s hard for a new speaker to keep the nouns straight without the extra clues.
You get used to it. The other way around is likely a lot harder, considering that a new concept is being introduced.
Can confirm. English is my first language and I took German in high school; it was basically just memorization for which words get which.
It was a bit confusing at first but I got used to it quickly, it’s much simpler this way
About as confusing as some people being nongendered. You get used to it pretty quickly, and it becomes a non-issue.
not at all. it simplifies the learning experience by quite a bunch.
one of the more confusing is learning other gendered languages where the gender of some object is different to the one in your mother tongue
To make matters worse, some languages have the exact same word but with a different gender. Heat in Spanish is el calor but in Catalán is la calor
To make matters even worse, in some languages the exact same word with different gender has different meaning.
In German:
“der Band”, male, = a (book) volume
“das Band”, neutral, = ribbon
“die Band”, female = (music) bandBonus: “die Bande” can be a gang, a sports barrier, and (relationship) ties.
It’s sure nice not having to learn German. I’m a native.
one of the more confusing is learning other gendered languages where the gender of some object is different to the one in your mother tongue
That’s something I hadn’t really considered. Interesting!
Yeah I basically never thought about the gender of English nouns because there’s very few reasons to
Not.
English is a very straigh forward to learn language.
Now, an English native speaker learning a gender declining language… oh, how fun to watch.
I find it fairly easy to learn but insanely difficult to master
Most of us who are native English speakers haven’t mastered it either, so you’re not alone
I speak my native language for a couple of decades now and the more I speak it, the more I realize I don’t master it.
I can read, write and hold a conversation in English. But if asked, I will say I can get by but very far from even the lowest level of mastery.
Not at all, it makes it simpler, in many cases you don’t even need it or is even simpler to convey the gender in other ways
Not at all, it’s easier that other gendered languages since object genders get shuffled up.
Try Finnish or Hungarian, even their pronouns are genderless.
OK, but ugro-finnic languages are incredibly harder compared to English, I would say even much harder than German (saying this as a basic Estonian speaker - which is similar to Finnish from what I can tell).
Not at all, we don’t do gendered words. The fact that pronouns are gendered still baffles me.
no, we just learn that “der”, “die”, “das”, “den”, “dem” all translate to “the”
Took German and college and the reverse really sucked with those forms of the
I find the lack of capitalisation to be worse honestly. A lot of sentences where it is not clear at first whether something is a noun or not
Capitalisation also makes skimming texts so much easier and faster since you can just jump from noun to noun until you find something relevant. I wish more languages did it.
What do you mean by this?
In German one capitalizes all nouns, proper or not.
Exactly
My first language is Mandarin which also has non-gendered nouns, so not confusing at all.
Mandarin truly has the best grammar. There are a few weird things, but in general it’s very simple and elegant.
Not a problem at all for me.
Arabic speaker here and now that you mention it, the way sentences can get very long without a way to tell what the fourth “it” in the sentence refers to can be a bit of a pain, as is having to reword said sentences when writing to avoid ambiguity, but what you’re thinking of there is declensions more than gendered nouns themselves. I mean gender doesn’t hurt to have but it’s the fact that in other European languages words change shape depending on their role in the sentence that’s making the difference here.
Not confusing at all, Spanish and English are very flexible languages
