The Evils of Feminine Gender (and Other Language Complaints)

[lacktheknack]

Russian is hard, guys.

The whole gender thing as a whole is painful, with pronouns changing constantly between contexts, wording, and the gender of the speaker AND the subject. Not to mention that every single noun is affected by the gender.

But states of being are even worse. It's hard enough when you want to express your gender-neutral or masculine disappointment with разочарованный, which is a mouthful in and of itself, but then you have a disappointed female, who is разочаровавшийся.

And I cannot.

Bleeding.

Say it.

ARGH.

So, those of you who are multilingual, what is "that one quirk" of a language that throws you for a loop every time? If you're not multilingual, feel free to complain about English as well.

 

[Euryalus]

The gender in german. Definitely the gender.

It's not even like there's somewhat of an order to it like in spanish. You just have to remember them all and they change based on case. It's horrible

Spoiler

 

[Raikas]

Noun cases in Swahili.

In particular the irregular ones - ki/vi, m/wa, etc. are easy to keep track of, but the ones that don't work that way always threw me off. Luckily it doesn't come up very often - I studied it my final year of university, and my in-laws grew up in Kenya, so they sprinkle bits of it in their conversation, but that's about it.

 

[Angelowl]

The gender in german. Definitely the gender.

It's not even like there's somewhat of an order to it like in spanish. You just have to remember them all and they change based on case. It's horrible

Spoiler

Essentially the same problem in swedish. Except we use gender-neutral terms for inanimate objects and the like. The problem occurs when we got two different pronouns, both gender-neutral. With absolutely no rules regarding which to use. It is the one thing that makes it easy to detect a non-native speaker.

On a side-note, we got a fair amount of people who want a gender-neutral word for people as well, add in plural and we got six different lingustical genders. Four of which are different versions of non-gendered.

(some parts are probably lost in translation, but you should get the point)

 

[Muspelheim]

Russian seems so lovely and practical on the surface. But then, they break out the gender... Long, twisty additions at the back of words, like a gazebo made out of porrige. At least French is open and honest with how bloody insane it can get.

Not that Swedish is much better. Hope you like to sing, because that is what you'll be doing.

 

[DoPo]

So, those of you who are multilingual, what is "that one quirk" of a language that throws you for a loop every time? If you're not multilingual, feel free to complain about English as well.

I am multilingual and my second language is English. I also know some (horrible) German but I won't talk about that because 1. it's mentioned already 2. it's bound to be mentioned again and again.

Anyway, I'm used to the Russian type of gender identity of words. It's actually tripping me up in English, to be honest. Too much gender neutrality compared to what I know, though I am doing better, I would still occasionally I would, for example refer to a dog as "he" instead of "it" or something like that because I still think of "dog" as masculine.

I am at least weary not to call children "it" and I'm proud to say, I've never done that. Thanks Jerome K. Jerome

There are various methods by which you may achieve ignominy and shame. By murdering a large and respected family in cold blood and afterward depositing their bodies in the water companies' reservoir, you will gain much unpopularity in the neighborhood of your crime, and even robbing a church will get you cordially disliked, especially by the vicar. But if you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human creature can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it."

 

[Chemical Alia]

I learned using the simplified Chinese writing system. Reading Chinese is already a big enough pain in the ass for me, but traditional characters are like an impenetrable text wall of strokes.

On the plus side, Chinese doesn't have gendered nouns, and gendered pronouns don't exist in speech, only writing. "他，她， 它" for "he, she, it" and all pronounced "ta". The distinction was only made due to western influence on the language.

I always hated cases in German.

 

[Abomination]

Gendered words always confuse the hell out of me. I need my language to have some form of structure to it, especially for something that applies to every single noun.

It's why I couldn't handle French - I could not, for the life of me, get over second-guessing myself as to what gender a word was. I flat out refused to even bother with what I considered a completely arbitrary and pointless complication of the language.
And people were able to understand me just fine. I opted to always use the masculine term unless I was discussing something that I viewed as being feminine - a woman, girl, women's clothing, makeup or a ship. If people thought it was weird I told them I thought their language was weird and I refused to play by the rules that couldn't and wouldn't be explained.

 

[Collegeboy21]

I'm fluent in Russian and actually lived in Ukraine for a couple of years. I feel your pain, man. Russian can be pretty messed up. Ukrainian is just weird.

 

[Flatfrog]

Gendered words always confuse the hell out of me. I need my language to have some form of structure to it, especially for something that applies to every single noun.

It's why I couldn't handle French - I could not, for the life of me, get over second-guessing myself as to what gender a word was. I flat out refused to even bother with what I considered a completely arbitrary and pointless complication of the language.
And people were able to understand me just fine. I opted to always use the masculine term unless I was discussing something that I viewed as being feminine - a woman, girl, women's clothing, makeup or a ship. If people thought it was weird I told them I thought their language was weird and I refused to play by the rules that couldn't and wouldn't be explained.

My wife knew an English guy like this in Germany. It used to drive the Germans crazy because he was completely fluent in the language, he just refused to use genders.

I don't think English ever had much in the way of genders but it certainly used to have cases - and at some stage people started to think 'fuck this' and stopped using them. All we've got left is a few tiny remnants like 'he/him/his' and some French borrowings like blonde/blond. The real bugger for learners of English is the crazy spelling system (based on etymology, grammar, false analogies and just random guesswork rather than phonetics like any sensible language).

 

[generals3]

Russian is hard, guys.

The whole gender thing as a whole is painful, with pronouns changing constantly between contexts, wording, and the gender of the speaker AND the subject. Not to mention that every single noun is affected by the gender.

But states of being are even worse. It's hard enough when you want to express your gender-neutral or masculine disappointment with разочарованный, which is a mouthful in and of itself, but then you have a disappointed female, who is разочаровавшийся.

And I cannot.

Bleeding.

Say it.

ARGH.

So, those of you who are multilingual, what is "that one quirk" of a language that throws you for a loop every time? If you're not multilingual, feel free to complain about English as well.

Gender doesn't bother me at all. Every noun is gendered in French too. What does annoy me are things like Nominatives, accusatives, genetives and all that nonsense. And while i faced most of it during Latin classes and thus is not an issue in itself anymore it did drive me away from learning German.

 

[CaptainMarvelous]

Uhh, in Japanese things can get weird because there are multiple words to refer to YOURSELF which are all context sensitive let alone other people and it's not just the start it's the verb and there are GRADIENTS of manners and arrrrghh, even though I found being polite impossible Russian sounds just soooo much harder. Hell, I'm expecting a small swarm of people joining in solely because that was the first language I thought of.

 

[Abomination]

The real bugger for learners of English is the crazy spelling system (based on etymology, grammar, false analogies and just random guesswork rather than phonetics like any sensible language).

This begs the question, is there a single language out there that doesn't have these problems? No gender descriptors, consistent rules and phonetic spelling?

The closest I can think of is Korean and that has the advantage of being a language that was designed by a King and fit for purpose.

 

[SckizoBoy]

The gender in german. Definitely the gender.

It's not even like there's somewhat of an order to it like in spanish. You just have to remember them all and they change based on case. It's horrible

Spoiler

I'm fairly sure Portuguese is even worse, because they have sixty-four case/gender combinations... or something.

Anyway, German is plain up weird for having 'girls' as 'neuter'! Uh... wut?!

I learned using the simplified Chinese writing system. Reading Chinese is already a big enough pain in the ass for me, but traditional characters are like an impenetrable text wall of strokes.

Now, see... simple-text is what infuriates me and everyone in my family, even though I can't read fluently-fluently. I grew up on traditional script and since I never formally learnt simple-text, I can't read it for shit, because I can never tell which character they're trying to simplify with what's printed.

Anyway, regarding Yue in particular, so much colloquial speech just cannot be written down.

I'll repeat: what in the hell good is a language spoken by roughly seventy-five million people when you can't write down almost half of they say from day to day?!

The Hong Kong colloquialism for 'confused' cannot be found in any dictionary anywhere, even though its direct equivalent in Japanese can! DX

 

[SckizoBoy]

The real bugger for learners of English is the crazy spelling system (based on etymology, grammar, false analogies and just random guesswork rather than phonetics like any sensible language).

English is the true bastard of all languages, true, but as far as pronunciation is concerned, English speakers learning have it lucky compared to naturally atonal speakers (i.e. any Romance/Latin/Cyrillic language) when trying to learn any tonal language (i.e. any Sino/Vietnamese language). Please, please, please, please tell me there're rules in Chinese pronunciation! XD

Even without that... French must be the only language with the Latin alphabet wherein there can be the letters '-ent' which aren't pronounced... just flat out ignored, and there's a strange rule that I can't remember associated with whether or not they're pronounced.

And let's not forget the South African languages... Xhosa and Zulu both have sets of clicks in speech and they're very different types of clicks as well.

So yeah, learning English isn't so bad after all... >_> ...

 

[Llil]

Any kind of weird pronunciation for me. Like intonation changing the meaning of the word or sentence, or the seven different kinds of "s" in russian, or some crazy throat sounds. The aspirated "t" is the most difficult one in english.

The real bugger for learners of English is the crazy spelling system (based on etymology, grammar, false analogies and just random guesswork rather than phonetics like any sensible language).

This begs the question, is there a single language out there that doesn't have these problems? No gender descriptors, consistent rules and phonetic spelling?

Finnish is pretty close to that. There are no genders at all even for "he/she". The spelling is almost entirely phonetical, with the only exceptions I can think of being "ng" and "nk" which are pronounced like they are in english instead of pronouncing the two letters separately, and the letter "n" which in speech changes into more of an "m" sound if it's followed by something like "p", because that's just easier to say.

There are also very few exceptions in grammar (I can't think of any off the top of my head), but there are loads of rules to compensate for that. And a whole bunch of grammatical cases as well. 15 to be specific, 16 in some dialects.

 

[Eien Shushu]

But states of being are even worse. It's hard enough when you want to express your gender-neutral or masculine disappointment with разочарованный, which is a mouthful in and of itself, but then you have a disappointed female, who is разочаровавшийся.

...and the punchline is: "разочаровавшийся" is not a disappointed female!
I know, right?

 

[Evil Moo]

I find the whole language thing to be horribly inefficient in general. Give me a neural interface where I can communicate through an abstract stream of thought and I'd be far happier with the situation...

 

[GabeZhul]

Hah, you guys think the noun genders are weird in modern languages? Try taking Akkadian 101 and then we will get back to the topic...

I mean, seriously, that is the only language I know where some nouns use male declination in singular and female declination in plural, and let's not even get into the dual declinations (used for stuff that are in pairs, like eyes or hands) and how the some preterite forms have gender while others not...

Also, I am Hungarian, and our language uses no genders whatsoever in the grammar. Try to imagine how insane it was for me when I first had to wrap my head around the concept when I started studying French...
English was comparatively simpler, but there I had issues with the tenses, as Hungarian only uses three (past, present and future) and so it was hard to bend my mind around stuff like past perfect continous and the like...

The baseline is this: if you live in a country using an indoeuropean offspring languages and only has to learn another, you are lucky. If you are not, good luck rewiring your brain.

 

[BitterLemon]

I'm fairly sure Portuguese is even worse, because they have sixty-four case/gender combinations... or something.

I'm a portuguese native speaker. Don't know how much there is, but yeah, I believe is maddening to speakers from neutral languages. But there is some logic, we don't memorize everything... Words ending with open sounds generally are feminine, closed sounds are masculine. The word "Lua" (Moon) is feminine, it's pronounced "Lu-wha". The word "Sol" (Sun), is pronounced "sow", so it's masculine. This creates a logic in our head that even when we don't know for sure, just the way the word sounds brings the feeling of feminine or masculine and then we make a guess. It's a bit confusing, but it's great for poetry and music.

People names follow the same logic.
Feminine names: Maria, Ana, Juliana.
Masculine names: Pedro, Paulo, Marcos.

I don't know how it works in french, german or russian, though.