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.
About as confusing as some people being nongendered. You get used to it pretty quickly, and it becomes a non-issue.
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!
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.
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).
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!
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.
Wait does Finnish not have gendered third person pronouns?
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.
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.
Swedish has genders, but not male/female but utrum/neutrum.
These are not really rule bound, and has to be learned word by word.
Some words are even double gendered but means different things depending on what gender is used.
Example
“En borr” / “borren” = a drill / the drill
“Ett borr” / “borret” = a drill bit / the drill bit.
But to answer your question, English is in many ways simpler than Swedish, you can specify any article by just putting “the” in front of it. In Swedish you need to select the proper -en/-et suffix with no real hard snd fast rule.
Where english is annoying is compound words.
“Realisationsvinstbeskattning” is the longest word in the Swedish dictionary, it is made up of three separate words,
Realisation - Sale
Vinst - Revenue
Beskattning - taxation
So the word simply means taxation on sale revenue.
According to Guinness book of world records the longest Swedish from 2006 the longest Swedish word is:
nordvästersjökustartilleriflygspaningssimulatoranläggningsmaterielunderhållsuppföljningssystemdiskussionsinläggsförberedelsearbeten
But that is just ridiculous and looks like it comes from a report for the military where someone made the word because they could and enjoyed languages.
Lets break it down into individual words
nord-väster-sjö-kust-artilleri-flyg-spanings-simulator-anläggnings-materiel-underhålls-uppföljnings-system-diskussions-inläggs-förberedelse-arbeten
I am on mobile and the word would take too long to translate here, but it means
“Preparatory groundwork for the discussion on maintenance systems for materials used in the coastal artillery’s flight reconnaissance simulator covering the north western costal sector.”
The issue with English for a Swedish speaker is the lack of compound words, making Swedes used to separating compound words when writing. Which can have fun results:
Herrskjorta = mens button down shirts
Herr skjorta = Mr. Skjorta
Kassapersonal = Cashier
Kassa personal = terrible staff members
I am learning a lot here. I am also Swedish lol. I was however great with the English classes, easily top 3 (okay honestly though I am being humble, I was really dominating those classes up until high school, so hard I dont even remember anyone even being in second or third place)
It sounds obnoxius but its true, if you also had a negative reaction to my story like myself, please find relief in that it was my peak and that I am single since years with heavy substance abuse going on the daily - also let me delete this in a bit okay bye lol
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.
What do you mean by this?
In German one capitalizes all nouns, proper or not.
Exactly
As someone trying to learn Spanish I wish there was no gendering in Spanish. It makes the language significantly harder to learn.
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.
