It’s a rare example of English being simpler than other languages, so I’m curious if it’s hard for a new speaker to keep the nouns straight without the extra clues.
If you want to be more confused, you should know that some languages have gendered verbs.
It was a bit confusing at first but I got used to it quickly, it’s much simpler this way
My first language is Mandarin which also has non-gendered nouns, so not confusing at all.
Mandarin truly has the best grammar. There are a few weird things, but in general it’s very simple and elegant.
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
in my language nouns aren’t gensered either so it was pretty easy
Technically English is my third languge, but also simultaneously my most fluent.
In short, not confusing at all. Because in Chinese (any variation of Chinese) nouns are also not gendered.
Pronouns in Chinese are also not gendered
He = 他 (tā)
She = 他 (tā)
No confusion with pronouns either. My parents constantly say he when refering to a woman, or she when refering to a man, or mix them up while talking about the same person in the same conversation. No me tho, I never get confused. I learned English at like grade 2-3.
What? She in Chinese is 她. It might not be used often but it definitely is gendered…
Nope. 她 isn’t really used. 他 is the pronoun, even if its refering to women.
Like if you wrote 他 to refer to a woman in an essay on a test, it’d get marked as correct.
Edit: Although, on the internet, people commonly type “TA” instead of “他”.
Edit 2: So clarification
他 refers to both men and women
她 can only be used to refer to women, and this is rarely used, except maybe in english class to teach about the english pronouns
它 refers to non humans, like animals or objects
all 3 are pronounce the same exact way (tā)
hmm, idk man, over here 他 is only for men, and 她 is only for women.
though in speaking we just use 佢 because canto
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.
Easy, no problems at all. English articles are what breaks my head.
Wow, really? “A, an, and the”? I’m curious how you get confused with those.
…because its the articles which are not gendered, not the nouns.
As the speaker of an English language me can tell you is not a difficult.
Because recognising when to use “a”, “the”, or 0 article is tricky.
A/an is usually fine. 0 article and the are tricky, and then getting it right on the fly is hard.
We take it all for granted and get it, but they’re hard for people who don’t have an equivalent in their first language.
Not at all, it’s easier that other gendered languages since object genders get shuffled up.
As someone trying to learn Spanish I wish there was no gendering in Spanish. It makes the language significantly harder to learn.
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.
I find it fairly easy to learn but insanely difficult to master
Most of us who are native English speakers haven’t mastered it either, so you’re not alone
I speak my native language for a couple of decades now and the more I speak it, the more I realize I don’t master it.
I can read, write and hold a conversation in English. But if asked, I will say I can get by but very far from even the lowest level of mastery.
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.
Ive spent some times on farms and haven’t ever herd/used he for a singular male sheep before.
If its a singular male I would say the ram.
But its just normally sheep, generally female. If you want to be specific its weathers, ewes, lambs or rams.
I remember reading a story written in English, and it kept mentioning „the cook“ (no pronoun, no name). My gender biased brain assumed the cook must be male. So I got confused when the pronoun „she“ finally appeared. I had to reread the paragraph to understand what was going on.
Embarrassing and eye opening.
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 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.
About as confusing as some people being nongendered. You get used to it pretty quickly, and it becomes a non-issue.
Try Finnish or Hungarian, even their pronouns are genderless.
OK, but ugro-finnic languages are incredibly harder compared to English, I would say even much harder than German (saying this as a basic Estonian speaker - which is similar to Finnish from what I can tell).
