The Evils of Feminine Gender (and Other Language Complaints)

[someonehairy-ish]

I can't pronounce the english "th" sound as in three. Which means i usually say tree (which gets confusing) or free (even more confusing).

To be fair, plenty of native English speakers pronounce it that way too. The stereotypical Irish accent would pronounce it 'tree', and those with more cockney influenced accents tend to say 'free'.
I've got a fairly cockney-ish accent but I don't do the th/f thing. Instead I've got the weird South-East 'll' sound. L's after vowels almost turn into W's, so 'will' sounds like 'wiw'. It's very odd.

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At the moment I'm learning Old English, which inflects for case just like German. Modern English basically ignores cases altogether and uses word order instead, so it gets quite confusing.

Not to mention that Old English doesn't have any set spelling either, so you have to read it aloud a few times before it makes sense.

 

[Weaver]

Gender neutral nouns is something English got VERY right in my opinion.

However, being stuck on such a convenient language feature it makes it really heard to learn other Latin/Roman/Germanic languages. German was really difficult for me.

Also, Germans, what's up with the second/conjugated verb in a sentence coming at the end of a sentence? You gotta hang on the edge of your seat waiting for someone to finally reveal what the hell they've been talking about. God help you if you have more than two verbs in a sentence.

Combine this with TWO past tenses (Perfekt and Imperfekt) and the language is just fucking impenetrable to me. Not only that, but I find Germans have an incredibly tight band pass filter for what they do and don't understand.

In Canada I can get into a cab with some guy who has been here Two weeks from Ethiopia, speaks the language half backwards and can't pronounce anything correctly and I know exactly what he's saying. Imagine like: "Take home you? Is where?" pronounced something like "Tok houm oo? Ees wvere?".

In Germany pronounce "Hauptbahnhof" as "Houptbahnhof" and no one has a fucking clue what you're trying to say.

 

[KR4U55]

In spanish, like most romance languages, every noun is gendered and every verb has its own temporal use, whether it's first, second or third person and whether the subject is singular or plural. Some of them get pretty crazy for no reason.

A good example would be "EL aguila", male noun, literal translation for "the eagle". When it's plural it becomes a female noun "LAS aguilas". It's weird, man.

Actually that is quite simple. "Águila" is actually femenine all the time, "águila calva", but there is a very specific rule about that. Unlike French and Catalan, Spanish does not cut short words (not even articles), officially so instead of having "l'águila" it would be "la águila", but is Spanish having "la a-" sounds wierd. So there is a simple rule. If your femenine word starts with an a, it uses "el" in singular. That is all. "Águila" and "água" remain femenine for all pourposes (adjectives will be femenine) but the article, where "el" is used. It is actually quite simple.

Well, I consider myself quite decent at elarning, but there are a few things that I just keep making mistakes.

WHile I understand that French use "liasson" when speaking, I just keep forgetting. It is a pain to recall that every time (well almost) that there is a vowel in the next word you you do pronounce the s or other otehrwise silent letters at the end of the previous word.

I'm also not very goo at remembering stresses in Catalan and French (even in Spanish I have problmes). When it is open, close or circumflex (well that last one has some consistency if you know ethymology) just falls inot deaf ears to me. French is all memory and Catalan has very subtle pronunciation differences which I can't tell usually.

Knaji reading in Japanese. My visual memory isn't that good, so I'm not good at memorizong kanji, but there are little to no rules as how you pick the readings. I really can't for the life of me to find a pattern to know when it is shita, oriru, moto, ka or any other of the ten readings it has. Damn, you need a lot of context and other lexicon to read a single kanji.

Actually, Spanish is my first language. I know there are some exceptions in several words because of fonetics. I think it's not that hard until you want to learn a specifical dialect. European Spanish is very different to any variant spoke in any Latinamerican country.

 

[Zen Bard]

Hindi. I hate the fact I have to wobble my head from side to side just to speak it.

Oh it's a grammatical rule, folks.

It's a rule...

You don't understand how many questions you've answered. Thanks!

Glad I could help!

 

[Kreett]

The problem with Swedish is that we have two different words for It," one being "den" and another being "det." It's impossible to know which one to use. For that reason, there's no clear consensus about game consoles, and if your Xbox is a "den" or a "det." It's kind of a pain.

Well, uh, why not let it be both? I usually say "den" if I am talking about my xbox specifically, but Xbox as a whole I usually say "det"

 

[Evil Moo]

You don't think in words? Huh. I do. Neural stream would just be me talking without moving my lips.

Your thoughts don't also include conceptualisations, imagery, emotion and other things that might be a helpful means of communication? Interesting.

And even if I must use words, I can think faster and more clearly than what usually finds its way to my voice.

 

[Nickolai77]

My wife knew an English guy like this in Germany. It used to drive the Germans crazy because he was completely fluent in the language, he just refused to use genders.

If i lived in Germany i'd probably be like that, genders drive me completely crazy, I don't see the point in them. From talking to Chinese people, I find they tend to struggle most with plurals and tenses in English so probably don't see the point in them like how i don't see the point of genders. It doesn't bother me if Chinese English speakers speak with incorrect use of plurals and tense, but i've spoken to Germans about it and been told it would bother them if you didn't get your genders right. To make matters worse with German you also have conjugations, so words like habe (have) arbiet (work) or fahren (travel) change depending on context. Then they have umpteen different ways of saying you- du, sie, dich, ihr etc... German has a lot of seemingly pointless complications.


As another poster has said, Chinese is simpler but you've got different things to worry about. You need to learn to differentiate between tones, learn Chinese characters, learn words which don't bare any resemblance to your own so they are harder to remember. Chinese has its simplicities but is in other ways bloody complicated.


Edit: I think the relative simplicity in the English language is part of the reason why English is so widespread in the world. It helps a lot that Britain had a huge empire and then America became a global superpower but the way the language is "designed" could also explain its global success.

Historically, i think this could be because when the English language was emerging you had a succession of foreign invaders- Various Germanic tribes, Danes, Norwegians and later Normans settling in England. With so many different dialects and languages on a small island it may have made sense to borrow each others words and scrap complicated grammar rules so the early English could understand eachother.

 

[SckizoBoy]

We pronounce "Jo" very differently from Spanish. I found a good explanation on google to the "jo" sound: it's the same sound of the "su" in "pleasure", or something like "zho". Say it like "zhoo-own" and you'll be good

Even though this was only about pronouncing one word, I've learnt quite a bit there! Thankee! XD

To be fair, plenty of native English speakers pronounce it that way too. The stereotypical Irish accent would pronounce it 'tree', and those with more cockney influenced accents tend to say 'free'.
I've got a fairly cockney-ish accent but I don't do the th/f thing. Instead I've got the weird South-East 'll' sound. L's after vowels almost turn into W's, so 'will' sounds like 'wiw'. It's very odd.

I can't quite remember which accent it is, but it completely fucks over vowels... 'throwing' becomes 'thr-AAN'.

Ah, the joys of British English... drive for half an hour in any direction from anywhere in the British Isles and you find a new accent! -.-

 

[BitterLemon]

It doesn't bother me if Chinese English speakers speak with incorrect use of plurals and tense, but i've spoken to Germans about it and been told it would bother them if you didn't get your genders right.

I don't know if it applies to german, or other latin languages, but in portuguese at least we generally omit the pronoun since it's possible to deduct from the tense, person and gender of the verb, so if you don't use correctly, your speech becomes too ambiguous and you'll understand others poorly. Maybe that's why they don't like it?

 

[KOMega]

I pretty much can only speak and write in english. I should learn a new language.
But when I was being taught french I just could not wrap my head around gendered words.

Referring to someone who has a gender makes sense. Random objects and words having genders is so... foreign to me.

That's probably not the right word, since I am talking about a different language. But damn it I can't make logical sense of why it is like that.

 

[GladiatorUA]

Russian is hard, guys.

The whole gender thing as a whole is painful, with pronouns changing constantly between contexts, wording, and the gender of the speaker AND the subject. Not to mention that every single noun is affected by the gender.

But states of being are even worse. It's hard enough when you want to express your gender-neutral or masculine disappointment with разочарованный, which is a mouthful in and of itself, but then you have a disappointed female, who is разочаровавшийся.

And I cannot.

Bleeding.

Say it.

ARGH.

So, those of you who are multilingual, what is "that one quirk" of a language that throws you for a loop every time? If you're not multilingual, feel free to complain about English as well.

Russian is not that hard... Well, it's kind of is but once you get a hang of the suffixes, prefixes and the endings it becomes genius.
The mess of English tenses is mostly contained in those suffixes. "Разочарованный" is not just "disappointed". It's "masculine object has been disappointed". And feminine form is "разочарованная". So it's basically just switched the endings. General verbs are much easier. Gender modifications don't appear for present or future tenses, only for past.
And the word itself is ridiculous. It has like two prefixes and bunch of suffixes. The root of it with basic meaning is "чар" which basically translates as charm or a spell. Everything else are stuff that transforms it into different related derivative words.
For me the word disappointed doesn't make much sense. What does it have to do with the word "appoint"?
"Разочаровавшийся" is slightly different. It's still a masculine form but it is derived from "разочароваший" which means "masculine object disappointed someone/something". The particle "-ся" just turns the action behind it onto the person it is tied to. "Разбил" = "crashed"(again masculine), "разбился"="crashed himself/itself". Not necessarily active participation but it points towards the object the action has happened to.

It's weird. But when you start to get a hang of it, it makes perfect sense. On the other hand Russian and other Slavic languages have free form sentence structure and much simpler rules for capital letters in the middle of the sentence. And you know if the word is a noun or a verb not by its position in a sentence but by the structure of the word itself. But suffixes are crazy(hard to learn if you didn't grow up with them). And spelling is sometimes also crazy.

 

[Billy D Williams]

I took German in Highschool. Got a B my first year. My second year they added the der/die/das bullshit and all the gender bullshit and I said 'Fuck this bullshit' and got a big fat F. Any I am totally OK with that.

Anyways, while English is stupid as hell when it comes to spelling (a P and H together make the same sound as an F, silent letters, etc.) at least it doesn't have all the ridiculous amounts of gender BS. God, I hate language.

 

[Olas]

Well I don't speak French, not fluently at least, or at a capacity where I would feel comfortable moving to a French speaking country, however I took my fair share of French classes in highschool and basically what I took away from it is that absolutely no rule in the French language is without a million bizarre exceptions and utter randomness abounds.

If you want to get a peak down the rabbit hole, just ask a French teacher to explain irregular verbs to you.

Also, the gender thing is pretty unintuitive. I remember the French word for tie, the clothing article typically worn bymen, is feminine. Why? Because cassie-toi that's why.

in french we dont have a neutral gender, it's what i had the most difficulty with in English when i was first Learning it, because i was always saying she for a table, or he for a fridge...

the thing i always forget in English is to capitalise the I, because there's no logical reason for doing it...

You also capitalize the first letter of the first word in every sentence.

 

[cathou]

Well I don't speak French, not fluently at least, or at a capacity where I would feel comfortable moving to a French speaking country, however I took my fair share of French classes in highschool and basically what I took away from it is that absolutely no rule in the French language is without a million bizarre exceptions and utter randomness abounds.

If you want to get a peak down the rabbit hole, just ask a French teacher to explain irregular verbs to you.

Also, the gender thing is pretty unintuitive. I remember the French word for tie, the clothing article typically worn bymen, is feminine. Why? Because cassie-toi that's why.

in french we dont have a neutral gender, it's what i had the most difficulty with in English when i was first Learning it, because i was always saying she for a table, or he for a fridge...

the thing i always forget in English is to capitalise the I, because there's no logical reason for doing it...

You also capitalize the first letter of the first word in every sentence.

in french we capitalize the first letter of the sentence too, but i always forget because i'm too used now to have a spelling checking program that do it for me...


une cravate, the french word for tie is feminine, un sein, the french name for a human breast is masculine...

the usual trick, well at least for a native speaker i guess because it would make any sence for somebody who dont already speak french, is to Wonder if you can say "a beautiful X" which in french would be "un beau X" for masculine and "une belle X" for feminine. and you choose what make sense... so "une belle chaise" sound better than "un beau chaise" (i guess for most of you it's not that clear but believe me it is...) but some words doest really work with that trick an i never remember is airplane is feminine or masculine, it's a trick word...

and you think irregular verbs are bad, just try to work with all the verbs tenses....
[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_conjugation[/link]

 

[someonehairy-ish]

To be fair, plenty of native English speakers pronounce it that way too. The stereotypical Irish accent would pronounce it 'tree', and those with more cockney influenced accents tend to say 'free'.
I've got a fairly cockney-ish accent but I don't do the th/f thing. Instead I've got the weird South-East 'll' sound. L's after vowels almost turn into W's, so 'will' sounds like 'wiw'. It's very odd.

I can't quite remember which accent it is, but it completely fucks over vowels... 'throwing' becomes 'thr-AAN'.

Ah, the joys of British English... drive for half an hour in any direction from anywhere in the British Isles and you find a new accent! -.-

Ah yes. There's quite a few that do that. I'M GAAAN DAAAN THE SHOPS, YOU WANT SUMMIN?

 

[TWRule]

As someone learning German right now, I agree with everything that has been said about that so far...

Also, I took three years of Japanese, and when I realized that after having a hard enough time memorizing 2 separate alphabets of around 72(?) letters each, there was a third 'alphabet', Kanji, with not only far more complex characters to read and write but there are apparently nearly as many of them as there are words in the language (not counting foreign words) with no apparently simple way to memorize them. Call me a quitter but I pretty much gave up at that point.

 

[Ian Booton]

This isn't so much a quirk of the language itself, but there's almost nothing in Latin that could be considered "Intermediate" in its difficulty. I mean you go from very basic stuff like learners and small quotes in Latin, and then most programs expect you to be reading high-level poetry as soon as you know just the basics. It's maddening. There is some stuff out there, especially nowadays, like Harrius Potter and Hobbitus Ille, which could I suppose be said to be intermediate, but it's just a bit sparse.

As well, there are very few speakers of Latin, and of those there are fewer who speak with the classical dialect like myself. It's nigh upon impossible to find good audio resources in Classical Latin.

As for the language itself? It's really not that bad. Highly regular with a few exceptions but usually ones that aren't too bad. Even gender is almost not a problem.

Does the word end in -us? It's almost certainly masculine.
Does the word end in -a? It's almost certainly feminine.
Does the word end in -um? It's almost certainly neuter.

There really aren't many exceptions to this rule. Of course, not every word has one of those three endings but many do. The rest you just have to know but it usually kinda makes sense.

The one thing that just gets me every time however, is that in Latin words can come in any order. Any order at all. Think of a sentence that make no sense because the word order is totally wrong. You can do that in Latin. There are hardly any rules. Oh, there are stylistic rules, but the grammar rules are indifferent. It makes reading long, complicated sentences VERY difficult sometimes.

 

[Auberon]

As mentioned, German... remembering each pronoun and word-specific cases. I probably could recall them if I took up courses.

 

[solemnwar]

I can't pronounce the english "th" sound as in three. Which means i usually say tree (which gets confusing) or free (even more confusing).

To be fair, plenty of native English speakers pronounce it that way too. The stereotypical Irish accent would pronounce it 'tree', and those with more cockney influenced accents tend to say 'free'.
I've got a fairly cockney-ish accent but I don't do the th/f thing. Instead I've got the weird South-East 'll' sound. L's after vowels almost turn into W's, so 'will' sounds like 'wiw'. It's very odd.

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At the moment I'm learning Old English, which inflects for case just like German. Modern English basically ignores cases altogether and uses word order instead, so it gets quite confusing.

Not to mention that Old English doesn't have any set spelling either, so you have to read it aloud a few times before it makes sense.

Oh the joys when writers would just write whatever they damned pleased for spelling! We have the printing press and the mass distribution of books to thank for the ending of that, let me tell you. More people started to read, and they started to complain that there wasn't any apparent standard to the spelling of words.

Can you tell I've taken a bunch of 18th/19th century literature classes.

I'm also super jelly that you get to learn Old English It used to be offered at my university but by the time I was able to take it (you needed at least a 2nd year level course as a perquisite) the professor who taught it had retired and it was no longer offered. Closest I got was at the beginning of my Mediaeval English Literature course. I even own a (concise) Anglo-Saxon dictionary.

YES I'M A NERD FOR ENGLISH AND HISTORY.

OT: I am linguistically retarded when it comes to any language other than my own, so uh... I just find languages hard in general. But that might just because I'm lazy as fuck.

 

[Dimitriov]

Snip

Just want to add that I love Latin for it's regularity. Even the irregular verbs mostly follow the same basic pattern as each other, which is only slightly different than regular systems anyway.

I am in my second year of Latin now and it is the first time I have truly enjoyed learning a second language.



I have also taken an intro course on Old English, which I found surprisingly difficult. Seriously, coming from modern English as my first language, Latin is easier and makes more sense than Old English does. It's actually kinda funny.

Also, in case anyone wants to know, Old English did indeed have noun genders (feminine, masculine, and neuter), and it was as messed up as any other language in that regard. For example wif meaning "woman" or "wife" is a neuter noun... and wif-mann meaning "woman" is, naturally, a masculine noun. Glad our language got rid of that crap

Oh the joys when writers would just write whatever they damned pleased for spelling! We have the printing press and the mass distribution of books to thank for the ending of that, let me tell you. More people started to read, and they started to complain that there wasn't any apparent standard to the spelling of words.

Can you tell I've taken a bunch of 18th/19th century literature classes.

I'm also super jelly that you get to learn Old English It used to be offered at my university but by the time I was able to take it (you needed at least a 2nd year level course as a perquisite) the professor who taught it had retired and it was no longer offered. Closest I got was at the beginning of my Mediaeval English Literature course. I even own a (concise) Anglo-Saxon dictionary.

YES I'M A NERD FOR ENGLISH AND HISTORY.

OT: I am linguistically retarded when it comes to any language other than my own, so uh... I just find languages hard in general. But that might just because I'm lazy as fuck.

If you ever get a chance to learn Old English, despite what I wrote above, I would recommend it. It's a weird and very Germanic language, but also quite beautiful. It also helps to clarify, as does Latin, why modern English is the way it is.

The best part of that Old English class, however, was that our textbook was written in 1882...