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.

133 points

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

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37 points

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

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45 points

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.

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8 points

It’s sure nice not having to learn German. I’m a native.

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14 points

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!

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12 points

Yeah I basically never thought about the gender of English nouns because there’s very few reasons to

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35 points

no, we just learn that “der”, “die”, “das”, “den”, “dem” all translate to “the”

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12 points

Took German and college and the reverse really sucked with those forms of the

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20 points
*

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

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20 points

Non-gendered wording isn’t exclusive to English. Asia exists.

I wasn’t trying to imply otherwise.

Thanks for the insight!

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3 points

Chinese is even cooler in that they don’t need different, often irregular versions of the same word for tense and plural either.

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Hell yes

Just use one character and there you have your plural

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4 points

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.

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19 points

If you want to be more confused, you should know that some languages have gendered verbs.

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16 points

Try Finnish or Hungarian, even their pronouns are genderless.

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2 points

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).

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