Ask Lemmy

As someone trying to learn Spanish I wish there was no gendering in Spanish. It makes the language significantly harder to learn.

Easy, no problems at all. English articles are what breaks my head.

It’s not confusing at all, except in the very specific case of nouns referring to people or animals that don’t have gendered variants.

For example, in my language, the word corresponding to “(a) sheep” has a masculine and feminine form, with the feminine used neutrally. Consequently, when seeing “sheep” in English, I assume the feminine and seeing it used with “he” is a bit of cognitive dissonance.

Similarly, most words for human professions are by default masculine.

Not.

English is a very straigh forward to learn language.

Now, an English native speaker learning a gender declining language... oh, how fun to watch.

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

Not at all, it's easier that other gendered languages since object genders get shuffled up.

Not at all, it makes it simpler, in many cases you don't even need it or is even simpler to convey the gender in other ways

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

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

You get used to it. The other way around is likely a lot harder, considering that a new concept is being introduced.

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

Try Finnish or Hungarian, even their pronouns are genderless.

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.

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.

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

I think it's just that one point where you have to accept things like that exist. Sometimes gendering slips out of your mind, but a lot of people let it slide.

English is missing quite a few grammatical features that are necessary for understanding of a German sentence. The genderedness (lolwat is that a word?) nouns helps recognise references, as does ~~declination~~ declension of nouns. German (as presumably other languages do) also uses a LOT more commas than English to structure sentences. So if you know what to look for, it can be very easy to parse even a complicated German sentence because everything has a signal attached telling you what it's doing in that sentence.

Obviously language can work perfectly fine without those features or English wouldn't exist. Still, there are frequently sentences in English that would have to be reworded quite heavily to lose their ambiguity, such as when there are several "it"s referenced and you have to take half a second to figure out which one is which. That's when I do sometimes miss my native language's features - but it's also when native English speakers struggle.

Edit: declination vs declension. Go away, I just woke up lol