It's not, why would that even be a good thing? Get rid of adding identifies to objects like a 6yo.
Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
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)
in my language nouns aren't gensered either so it was pretty easy
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 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.
As someone trying to learn Spanish I wish there was no gendering in Spanish. It makes the language significantly harder to learn.
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.
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) band
Bonus: "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
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's easier that other gendered languages since object genders get shuffled up.
If you want to be more confused, you should know that some languages have gendered verbs.
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
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
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.
That's because Sean isn't an English word.
Most English words aren't English words, which doesn't help.
Not with that attitude it doesn't!
Where, were, ware...
Wear
I will read that book again that i read before
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!
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.
Try Finnish or Hungarian, even their pronouns are genderless.
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.
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
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 would do it.