• 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’.