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 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
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
Non-gendered wording isn’t exclusive to English, it’s mostly other European languages that stick to doing that.
There are some languages that don’t even have different words for “he” and “she”.
Edit: made the wording less asshole-y
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.
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…
Wear
I will read that book again that i read before
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
Not with that attitude it doesn’t!
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, it’s easier that other gendered languages since object genders get shuffled up.
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.
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.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’m a Finnish speaker. Nouns aren’t gendered in Finnish either, so that’s not weird.
Things that do trip me up:
- Pronouns (lack of T/V distinction (i.e. just one “you”) and gendered third person)
- Articles (Finnish doesn’t have articles as such, so adding them sometimes takes some brainpower)
- so freaking many irregular verbs etc
- seriously what is this orthography even (Finnish grammar may be complex, but the same can’t be said of the pronunciation)
Actually, I’m learning French right now and gendered nouns aren’t even that much of a problem. I was dreading the numerals more.
We actually do have a second person singular, “thou.” We just transitioned out of using it because ‘politeness’. Thou could useth the second person singular, but thou would soundeth quite archaic. (Think I conjugated that correctly.) You can still see it used in some religious texts in reference to God.
I believe it’d be thou wouldst sound archaic or thou soundest [most] archaic, in early modern English depending on the tense, but that’s a great point.
I think you’re right. I didn’t think the “helper words” in the conditional should get conjugated, but I grabbed a Book of Common Prayer off the shelf and there’s a bunch of “thou shalt” + infinitive, so evidently the conditional does get conjugated (in addition to “thou didst” and “thou hast”.) Pretty sure I noticed some 2nd person weak verbs that looked like they had the same conjugation as the 3rd person (eg “Remember thou keep holy …”) I did note “he cometh”, so maybe that -eth ending is actually an older conjugation for the 3rd person that later morphed into an -s ending? Just noticed “he saith (says)”, and the confirmed -eth ending on a bunch of 3rd person congregations. Interestingly, I found a LOT of “thou shalt”, some “thou wilt”, but no “thou couldst” or “thou wouldst”. Probably because the BCP is all like, “you WILL, this is not an option, sinner.”
I don’t know though! I’m a typical English first language speaker and I’m just going with what feels right and using my understanding of grammar from my French education.
It does get confusing! I’m kind of a Shakespeare nerd, and the cult I was in till I was a young adult was big on the King James Version of the bible, so I guess I’ve just had a lot of exposure. I don’t really know the rules.
Wait does Finnish not have gendered third person pronouns?
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
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.
Most of us who are native English speakers haven’t mastered it either, so you’re not alone
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.
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.
As the speaker of an English language me can tell you is not a difficult.
…because its the articles which are not gendered, not the nouns.
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.
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
Technically English is my third languge, but also simultaneously my most fluent.
In short, not confusing at all. Because in Chinese (any variation of Chinese) nouns are also not gendered.
Pronouns in Chinese are also not gendered
He = 他 (tā)
She = 他 (tā)
No confusion with pronouns either. My parents constantly say he when refering to a woman, or she when refering to a man, or mix them up while talking about the same person in the same conversation. No me tho, I never get confused. I learned English at like grade 2-3.
What? She in Chinese is 她. It might not be used often but it definitely is gendered…
Nope. 她 isn’t really used. 他 is the pronoun, even if its refering to women.
Like if you wrote 他 to refer to a woman in an essay on a test, it’d get marked as correct.
Edit: Although, on the internet, people commonly type “TA” instead of “他”.
Edit 2: So clarification
他 refers to both men and women
她 can only be used to refer to women, and this is rarely used, except maybe in english class to teach about the english pronouns
它 refers to non humans, like animals or objects
all 3 are pronounce the same exact way (tā)
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
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.
