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.
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.
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.
It’s not, why would that even be a good thing? Get rid of adding identifies to objects like a 6yo.
As someone trying to learn Spanish I wish there was no gendering in Spanish. It makes the language significantly harder to learn.
English may not have gendered nouns, but it has plenty of other challenges.
