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.
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What? She in Chinese is 她. It might not be used often but it definitely is gendered…
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hmm, idk man, over here 他 is only for men, and 她 is only for women.
though in speaking we just use 佢 because canto
It was a bit confusing at first but I got used to it quickly, it’s much simpler this way
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
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!
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.
Yeah I basically never thought about the gender of English nouns because there’s very few reasons to
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).
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
What do you mean by this?
In German one capitalizes all nouns, proper or not.
Exactly
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.
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.
English is missing quite a few grammatical features that are necessary for understanding of a German sentence. The genderedness (lolwat is that a word?) nouns helps recognise references, as does declination of nouns. German (as presumably other languages do) also uses a LOT more commas than English to structure sentences. So if you know what to look for, it can be very easy to parse even a complicated German sentence because everything has a signal attached telling you what it’s doing in that sentence.
Obviously language can work perfectly fine without those features or English wouldn’t exist. Still, there are frequently sentences in English that would have to be reworded quite heavily to lose their ambiguity, such as when there are several "it"s referenced and you have to take half a second to figure out which one is which. That’s when I do sometimes miss my native language’s features - but it’s also when native English speakers struggle.
Some of them are, which is even more confusing.
Slavic native speaker here.
Not at all. Much simpler, in contrast with German.There are few gendered nouns, like a spoke(man/woman/person), act(or/ress), etc.
These are on the decline these days in favour of gender neutral terms, e.g.
- Chair/chairperson
- Spokesperson
- Actor
- Firefighter
- Police officer
- Paramedic
Non-gendered wording isn’t exclusive to English. Asia exists.
There are some languages that don’t even have different words for “he” and “she”.
Non-gendered wording isn’t exclusive to English. Asia exists.
I mean to be fair those languages have other ways of determining which word does what other than sentence order and vibes if my knowledge of basic Chinese is correct.
Non-gendered wording isn’t exclusive to English. Asia exists.
I wasn’t trying to imply otherwise.
Thanks for the insight!
Chinese is even cooler in that they don’t need different, often irregular versions of the same word for tense and plural either.
Hell yes
Just use one character and there you have your plural
They lose out in that any time you refer to something that can be counted, you have an irregular counting word before it. Each word doesn’t get its own counting word though, and there’s a generic, ge you can always use if you have the vocabulary of a 3 year old, so it’s not that bad, but it’s still completely unnecessary memorization.
Here I agree, it’s an unnecessary pain, and the counting words are often super counter-intuitive
If you want to be more confused, you should know that some languages have gendered verbs.
The nouns still are gendered. Only the article is gender-neutral.
Tarzan is a man. He lives in the jungle.
Jane is a woman. She is visiting Africa.
The elephant is a non-named animal. It eats fruits and leaves.
If you really want to know a confusing issue about the English language, just look at the pronunciation of words. It is more or less rule-free, and all over the place. Don’t believe me? Try to read the poem “The Chaos” aloud. Even most native speakers need several attempts.
It still bugs me that Sean Bean’s name doesn’t rhyme.
Where, were, ware…
I will read that book again that i read before
Wear
Not with that attitude it doesn’t!
That’s because Sean isn’t an English word.
Most English words aren’t English words, which doesn’t help.
So true. English is a bastard language, a bully in a trench coat stealing words from all the other languages. That’s what makes it so confusing to learn/read/use but also fun to use
Eh, gendered nouns are just an old holdover. At least English (usually) uses words to improve specificity. For example, “Pick up my medicine” as opposed to “pick up medicine.” It seems redundant to some until suddenly you need to specify after the fact.
The more precise the language the fewer chances of miscommunication. A perfect language would be precise and unambiguous without deliberate effort (as opposed to laziness, slang, shorthand, etc.) which is probably completely impossible to craft, much less about.
I disagree that being perfectly unambiguous is a feature of a “perfect” language.
Ambiguity creates holes for us to fill, and some people don’t realize how good it feels to fill those holes.
Out of German and English, I always found German to be better suited for factual texts (scientific papers and essays, news textbooks, encyclopedias etc.) because it’s less ambiguous and English for more creative writing (novels, poems, opinion pieces, speeches etc.) because there is more scope for the imagination and the ambiguity leaves more room for double entendres, puns and other fun stuff. There are advantages to both.
It was weird in the very beginning, but it’s good and I love it!
Absolutely worth getting used to, way less headaches
*way fewer headaches
(Sorry)
