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submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 86 points 10 months ago

Trick question, washing machines come in many different genders:

[-] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

I thought pans came in many different genders

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[-] [email protected] 71 points 10 months ago
[-] [email protected] 32 points 10 months ago
[-] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago

No one who speaks German could be an evil man.

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[-] [email protected] 64 points 10 months ago

If you get the wrong one just accuse the examiner of being transphobic.

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[-] [email protected] 60 points 10 months ago

This is my go to response when people are trying to claim that English is hard... Well at least I don't have to remember what gender has randomly been assigned to every noun I want to use.

[-] [email protected] 45 points 10 months ago

No, instead you have to learn to read and spell in a system that often sounds quite different to what is written. I want to read a book that's never been read. I want to live a life alive at a live show. Anything ending in ~ough which has something like 6 or 8 different sounds. I'm a native speaker trying to work with my wife on English (we speak Japanese at home). It's insane for any reading/spelling.

[-] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Are you through laughing at the English kneading dough in a trough, though?

[-] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago

As soon as I stop hiccoughing and cut this bough

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[-] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

Oh yeah, unlike French where 2/3 of each word is silent.

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[-] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago

I rarely hear people saying English is hard, except for the pronunciation.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago
[-] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

And then, when you're learning French, you have to watch out for words that have a different gender than in German.

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[-] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago

Have you tried asking the washing machine for its preferred pronouns?

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[-] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Easy. Since it's the womans' job to do laundry, the washing machine is also female ^/s^

[-] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

So you mean la bite is ...

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[-] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago

Me in my mandarin class not having to conjugate, add pronouns, use words like the and to, and not having words more than 4 syllables. But having to learn 10,000 + characters

[-] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago

Female in Russian, because the word machine/машина ends with A, and so any machine, from tattoo gun to steam engine is female gendered. I always thought French and German worked in somewhat similar manner?

[-] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It works like that in French until you use a different word for the machine.

"Mon ordinateur est une bonne machine". In a single sentence my computer was described with words both male and female.

It's just vocabulary and grammar, not the deep essence or identity of things or people.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

it is in German too.

It is die Waschmaschine. and a Steam Engine ist die Dampfmaschine. And it is a very straight foreard naming convention. Just add what kind of machine it is to the front of the noun.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I didn't learn of any rhyme or reason to it in German when I took classes on it. In fact, in a few cases, the gender changes the meaning of the word. Der See und die See, for example. One means lake and the other means sea/ocean.

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[-] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago

In Spanish it even depends on which dialect you're speaking.

In some places it's "la lavadora" (she/her), and in other places it's "el lavarropas" (he/him).

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[-] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago

How aggregious is misgendering items in other languages? I assume it's no big deal and may not even be worth correcting most of the time?

[-] [email protected] 32 points 10 months ago

In German, they sometimes add the gender into the word. Like if you hire a few "Stripper" in German, they will be all male, while "Stripperinnen" would be all female and there is no generally accepted way if you want a mix or non-binaries, you'd have to describe it. This can lead to quite a lot of confusion, especially with words derived from English like this.

So what I'm saying is, if you use the English word and misgender, it can be a big deal. Like 7 or 8 inches big, on some occasions.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

The example you used involved humans. They were asking about items.

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[-] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It sounds very weird and you know immediately it's a foreigner speaking. When you are fluent the genders just come naturally, I don't think I've ever seen a native making a mistake like that, maybe children.

I wouldn't correct anyone unless they want to learn though, the noun itself is more important and it carries the meaning across.

This is for Brazilian Portuguese at least.

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[-] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

It's jarring but obviously completely acceptable from someone learning the language

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[-] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago

This one is funny actually! You can say une machine à laver, or un lave linge. :D

[-] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

Never in my life did I hear the term lave linge

[-] [email protected] 34 points 10 months ago

Really? I've seen it at least twice in the last minute.

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[-] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

It’s probably makes sense once explained properly but as an outsider to gendered languages in general it feels like the stupidest archaic idea ever lol.

[-] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago

Grammatical gender has nothing to do with sexual gender. It is simply the expression on how words are declined in different cases.

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[-] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

End-syllables help a long way:

For example the often cited neutral: girl/Mädchen is a diminutive. So everything with -chen or -lein becomes neutral and therefore: das.

(Brötchen, Männlein, Häuschen, Fräulein)

https://mein-deutschbuch.de/genusbestimmung.html#nachsilben

As a bonus: in plural everything is "die" so just formulate everything in plural and you are always right.

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[-] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

Une machine, putain !

Noticed that space after putain ? When the sign has two things, like an exclamation mark or a colon, you put the space in between. Otherwise not !

Sorry for the the frenchification by using the "espace insécable" in the English text.

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this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
1111 points (98.3% liked)

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