Clarification Edit: for people who speak English natively and are learning a second language

  • norimee@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    For what it’s worth, you don’t memorize the gender of things. It’s just difficult, when you learn another language that does it differently. And that’s true for every language you learn, the difficulty lies in how it’s different of your own.

    • leftzero@lemmynsfw.com
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      6 months ago

      I mean, you do memorise them, you just don’t realise you’re doing it because you’re a baby or toddler and babies and toddlers are language sponges, and not very aware of how their own minds work.

      When learning a gendered language as an adult you definitely have no option but to memorise what gender each word uses, since there’s generally no specific rule, just how the language happened to evolve. (And this can be particularly hard if your native language is gendered, but you’re trying to learn one that genders words differently, for instance when learning German coming from a Romance language, or vice versa.)

            • leftzero@lemmynsfw.com
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              6 months ago

              Except many languages’ vocabularies share common roots (e.g. Latin and Greek) even if the languages themselves don’t, so quite often someone learning Spanish will be able to make an educated attempt at figuring out the equivalent Spanish word (for instance, an English speaker might figure out that machinemáquin_)… but will have no clue about the gender, having a 50% chance of ending up with, say, máquino.

              And, as I said, misgendering words seems to be a relatively common mistake for people learning Spanish without having a Romance language base.