• isthingoneventhis@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Man French was so difficult for my brain to parse. The word genders felt so silly/arbitrary that it never stuck, which is hilarious given the context of … English, but omfg did it not gel with me.

    • Gork@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Yeah the general lack of gendered nouns is one of English’s better traits, even if most of our words are bastardized words from other languages.

    • yA3xAKQMbq@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      It’s the same in German. The issue is that people learning the language try to make sense of it. It doesn’t feel arbitrary, it is completely arbitrary. As a native you don’t think about that at all, because they’re like one word to you.

      When you learn a language like German as a native, you don’t have rules or think about what is gendered how and why.

      It’s not that you learn „Sonne“ (sun) and „Mond“ (moon) first and then learn the appropriate gender for each.

      You learn „die Sonne“ and „der Mond“ from the start. It’s just one word with a blank in the middle to us.

      • isthingoneventhis@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah. It’s funny because I am learning Danish eight now and it makes infinitely more sense than French ever did but I think it’s because, at least to me, it’s much closer to English and a lot of it is “well we do it just cause?” and my brain is like “oh cool great! I know how to cope with that”.

        Whereas learning something that is so structured like German/French it feels very overwhelming I guess in that sense. I don’t feel like I have to think about Danish because it feels very ‘normal’.