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.
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 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
Yeah I basically never thought about the gender of English nouns because there’s very few reasons to
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.
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 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
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.
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.
It was a bit confusing at first but I got used to it quickly, it’s much simpler this way
Easy, no problems at all. English articles are what breaks my head.
Wow, really? “A, an, and the”? I’m curious how you get confused with those.
Because recognising when to use “a”, “the”, or 0 article is tricky.
A/an is usually fine. 0 article and the are tricky, and then getting it right on the fly is hard.
We take it all for granted and get it, but they’re hard for people who don’t have an equivalent in their first language.
…because its the articles which are not gendered, not the nouns.
As the speaker of an English language me can tell you is not a difficult.
Not at all, we don’t do gendered words. The fact that pronouns are gendered still baffles me.
Not confusing at all, Spanish and English are very flexible languages
As someone trying to learn Spanish I wish there was no gendering in Spanish. It makes the language significantly harder to learn.
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.
Not at all, it’s easier that other gendered languages since object genders get shuffled up.
About as confusing as some people being nongendered. You get used to it pretty quickly, and it becomes a non-issue.
It’s not, why would that even be a good thing? Get rid of adding identifies to objects like a 6yo.
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
It’s not confusing at all, except in the very specific case of nouns referring to people or animals that don’t have gendered variants.
For example, in my language, the word corresponding to “(a) sheep” has a masculine and feminine form, with the feminine used neutrally. Consequently, when seeing “sheep” in English, I assume the feminine and seeing it used with “he” is a bit of cognitive dissonance.
Similarly, most words for human professions are by default masculine.
Ive spent some times on farms and haven’t ever herd/used he for a singular male sheep before.
If its a singular male I would say the ram.
But its just normally sheep, generally female. If you want to be specific its weathers, ewes, lambs or rams.
I remember reading a story written in English, and it kept mentioning „the cook“ (no pronoun, no name). My gender biased brain assumed the cook must be male. So I got confused when the pronoun „she“ finally appeared. I had to reread the paragraph to understand what was going on.
Embarrassing and eye opening.
