Comment on English may be a hot mess but at least we don't have to worry about this nonsense
morgan_423@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Non-neutral nouns have always struck me as odd. They provide no info gain whatsoever outside of actually providing a gender if you’re referring to a person or animal (for example, in Spanish, gato -> male cat, gata -> female cat). And in those situations, a short sentence can provide instant clarification.
It’s a language feature built to be helpful in one use case, whilst simultaneously being worse in about a bazillion others. It’s a very odd choice.
Blyfh@lemmy.world 4 months ago
There’s an argument to be made that it might help clarifying when speaking to someone. Consider these two German sentences:
Imagine a noisy environment, a quiet speaker or some other problem and you only understand
In a language like English, you don’t have enough information to understand the meaning. The German gender system helps to direct your possible matching words (Ampel or Apfel) to the correct one, as “Die rote Apfel” is grammatically incorrect.
Another point I want to make is that it isn’t “being worse in about a bazillion other” use cases. Native speakers don’t really have an issue with noun class systems. It’s just very unintuitive and tedious for non-native language learners to memorize all the genders of nouns.
Capricorn_Geriatric@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I’d like to interject for a bit, if I may.
While german has cases, somewhat more complex verbs and gendered nouns, english also has its peculiarities that make it hard for non-natives to learn. Things like spelling and using the same word in a bazillion contests and methaphor-based idioms come to mind first. There are also simple-to-understand pecularities like its/it’s and paid/payed which not even natives get right sometimes.
The point being, for all the “hard” and “useless” parts of one language the other language (as it’s always comomparing apoles to oranges) has similarily “hard” and “useless” features itself, so in my opinion it more or less evens out.
What makes a language “easier” or “harder” to learn is how much of it you already know. In other words that’s usually how similar it is to the languages you know already.
Blyfh@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I mostly agree. Sorry if it came out that way, but my comment was not meant to be stating that English is way easier than German. Just wanted to point out that this “hard” and “useless” feature is not that useless and only hard for language learners.
marron12@lemmy.world 4 months ago
And then there’s the different ways to connect verbs in English.
There aren’t rules for that, as far as I know. Just very fuzzy guidelines at best. And word stress is pretty random too. Both of those things can be tricky for non-native speakers.