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People who speak English as a second language: how confusing is it that nouns are not gendered? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

89 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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

I wasn't trying to imply otherwise.

Thanks for the insight!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Hell yes

Just use one character and there you have your plural

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Here I agree, it's an unnecessary pain, and the counting words are often super counter-intuitive

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

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.