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
100% of the people I talk to speak in English. I don’t need to know fancy languages to feel successful, actually I never had any viable reason to learn them.
I’m not saying they’re fancy, just that there are more people on the planet that can’t speak English than people who can.
Also, most people on the planet speak multiple languages. There are even less people on the world that only speak a single language than there are English speakers. So, if anything, speaking just a single language, even if it’s English, is the abnormal thing.
Lastly, it’s not about “feeling successful”, as you put it, but about being able to communicate with more people and being able to enjoy more things.
Also, most people on the planet speak multiple languages. There are even less people on the world that only speak a single language than there are English speakers. So, if anything, speaking just a single language, even if it’s English, is the abnormal thing.
That’s your opinion.
Lastly, it’s not about “feeling successful”, as you put it, but about being able to communicate with more people and being able to enjoy more things.
Like I said earlier. I don’t have any reason to learn Spanish or whatever if I only talk in English.
Languages were made to communicate with others. USA resolved that issue.
Sorry you’re being downvoted, I think you’re entirely correct. I hope the other people just don’t realize how jokes that are relativising transphobic experiences like that are downplaying the actual issues trans people are facing.
But nobody is downplaying it? Yes Trans people face a lot of issues and they really need to be supported in many ways, but I don’t think this joke insinuates any of that.
I do think that comparing a non native speaker using the wrong article with trans people having to fear for their lives sometimes is downplaying it. I don’t think that was the intent with the original comment, which is why I also don’t appreciate the other person’s snappy response. But I do believe those kinds of jokes can subconsciously make people believe things aren’t as bad as they actually are.
Second, I’m not the one to pull transphobia into the context. The joke did that on its own.
Third, I’m looking to have a civil discussion, you’re the one exaggerating things and starting drama by throwing profanities around and accusing me of virtue signalling.
Oh grow the fuck up would you and quit the offended on behalf of others shtick.
OPs post was not transphobic in the slightest. You’re just a shit head trying to manufacture drama.
You are not looking for civil discussion so don’t try and sell me that pile of horseshit either. You are trying to create drama and are acting like a cliche virtual signalling douchebag.
The issue with not getting offended on the behalf of minorities is that nobody will listen otherwise. Which is kind of detrimental to minorities getting to live a decent and free life, as every human deserves. So, I try to do my best to be informed of marginalized groups and protect their interests. I am open to discussion and different opinions if you can show me that at least some of the affected people agree.
If you think that’s ‘causing drama’ a civil discussion won’t be possible. But don’t put the blame on me - that is entirely on you and your unwillingness to check your privilege.
I’ve never heard the term “minority-splaining”, but I assume you took inspiration from “mansplaining” or “whitesplaining”. Which, in the first place, already doesn’t make any sense, because white people/men are the privileged ones in that situation, but the minorities are obviously not privileged, and aren’t the ones doing the senseless explaining.
So if my assumption is correct, for it to be “minority-splaining”, you would need to be trans. However, I don’t see anything on your profile that makes me believe so. Thus, I am not telling someone who is affected that their opinion is invalid (which, I didn’t even tell you that your opinion was invalid). And even if you were trans, I would be open to discussion and to learn about how this is not transphobic. So no, this is not “minority-splaining”.
I am trying to use my privilige to fight against bigotry. If you can’t see that, again, that’s on you.
What is ‘projecting ones privilige’ even supposed to mean?
Feel free to respond, but I’m just gonna stop replying to you now because it really seems to me like you are just trolling at this point.
if you really think telling someone to check their privilige is offensive in any way whatsoever, I have no idea how anyone is supposed to help you get out of that hole you dug yourself.
also, you keep circling back to your same non-argument, a tell tale sign of a troll. go back to lurking. bye!
We can, but we have to work for it. When any group is no longer being systemically discriminated and have equal rights, then they’re also valid comedy targets.
Like with racist jokes. They’re fine in very confined groups where everyone agrees that the absurdity of the premise is part of the joke and where nobody will be made to feel unsafe by it. But to a wider audience where people might misunderstand where the joke came from, in what spirit it was told in, it’s nok OK. Not only can it make people from the group being targeted feel unsafe, but it’ll also embolden actual racists who’ll mistake the joke as support of their beliefs.
It’s a trust thing I guess. As soon as trans people can see someone crack a joke about them online and rest assured in the fact that the person telling that joke isn’t voting for or otherwise enabling people who wants to take away their rights or straight up hurt them, then it’ll be fine.
This protection, however, should not apply to people who make it their business to hurt or oppress other people, which is why it’s always open season on nazis.
Yes, that’s the point. You need to memorize which words go with la and which with le. Or der/die/das for German. Or no articles for Slavic languages but the declination and other words in the sentence (selection of pronouns, forms of adjectives and sometimes verbs) depend on the gender.
If I remember correctly from my German class in highschool, the rule of thumb was if it’s an inanimate object use the feminine Die. That was in the mid 90s and I haven’t spoken German since, so that with a grain of salt.
The more accurate rules of thumb are based on word endings. -e or -in suggest it’s feminine, -er or -or that it’s masculine, and -chen or -ling that it’s neutral. Such hints only work for about 30 % of words but some are close to 100% accurate.
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?
i don’t recall there being any rhyme or reason to gender in german, but it’s been many years since i studied. i do remember that the gender of any word like ____-machine would be whatever the gender is for machine.
The only actual rule I’m aware of is diminutives (i.e. words ending in -chen or -lein) always being neuter (das). This is also the reason why it’s das Mädchen (girl) and das Fräulein.
The rest is arbitrary, and sometimes there’s even regional variations.
Native German speaker here, can confirm yes, there are some patterns but mostly the genders are pretty random; but a Waschmaschine is feminine because a Maschine is feminine, yes
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.
OMG, I’ve been doing my Duolingo lessons and never realised that they had different meanings, I just thought Germans used one word for all bodies of water 😭
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.
The general rule of thumb in French is the word is feminine if it ends with “-le” like “la table”, the table is feminine with it the article “la” to denote feminine. But this is not always the case. For example, house in French is “la maison” which doesn’t end in “-le”.
Sometimes it changes. For example, Covid in French, everyone was using “le covid” (i guess cos it’s a virus, and virus is a masculin word), but then I believe the French academy weighed in that it should be “la covid” because it’s not the virus but the disease (la maladie) we’re talking about. Anyway. Yeah other than the official sources, many of us peasants all still say Le covid because by the time they weighed in we were all saying Le and so now saying La sounds weird.
At least for romance languages, there is a rhyme and reason for the gender each noun gets, so neologisms and borrowed words tend to follow the same logic.
For word morphology, as an example, in Portuguese nouns ending in a are almost always female, so new words that end with a are very likely to be female.
There are semantic rules too, for example brands and companies are typically (I want to say always but there’s probably edge cases) female, so even though Netflix and Amazon didn’t exist before they’re still female.
there is a rhyme and reason for the gender each noun gets
There is? I only took high school level French, so I’m very ignorant on the topic and happy to admit so, but any time I asked that about that very idea all I ever got in response was “that’s just how it is!”, so I would love to learn if you’re willing to elaborate.
And I don’t think “it ends in A” is solid enough foundation to call it “rhyme and reason”
Yes, there is a rhyme and reason, but because that requires actually delving into linguistics studying (plus etymology for all those edge cases that got carried over from Latin and other languages), most people don’t get too deep into it apart from shallow rules (eg: if word starts/ends in X then it’s male/female).
Not even natives of gendered languages usually bother learning the nitty gritty rules, they just pick it up as they go, that’s how all of us learn our languages.
On a practical level, it’s also much easier to teach a 6 year old in elementary that something is male/female just because, and to remember that, than to go into each and every individual case (morphology, syntax, semantics, etc.), which themselves typically have edge cases due to history and whatnot. Especially because that child will naturally pick it up as they absorb the language around them so it really doesn’t matter much.
And then there’s just those cases where we actually don’t know because the etymology got lost. Yeah, that’s fun.
In school I was never taught why something is male/female yet I can always distinguish them naturally in my. day to day because that’s how I’ve always lived. That’s just one of the amazing things of human language.
If you ask a native of a gendered language why they think X word should be male instead of female they’ll probably just tell you it sounds wrong otherwise, and that’s literally the end of it for most of us. We don’t think about it, we just intuitively know it sounds right or wrong. I’m sure that’s frustrating to hear for a foreigner trying to learn, but you can’t teach what you don’t know. In the end, other than very broad rules, the best way typically is to just start memorizing it one by one.
Also, “ends in A” is definitely rhyme or reason in Portuguese, that’s actually a rule. Although to be more specific it’s a tonic A, but even that has an exception if it’s a nasal Ã, but I didn’t want to get into phonology too, I just wanted to give a simple example.
I speak French and it probably doesn’t help but it just sounds wrong when misgendered except for words that begin with a vowel syllable for some reason. Even we, struggle with those. E.g. avion, hélicoptère, école. We also use the l’ for those words instead of le/la but it becomes harder when we’re have to choose un/une. Maybe that’s a hint to what’s happening. Any language expert can chime in?
In slav languages, you just go with how the neologism sounds. “Computer” ends in hard r, so it’s masculine, for example.
Every once in a while there’s going to be shit like with “coffee” though. It sounds neutral-gendered and is officially neutral-gendered, but there’s been a big period when people believed it should be masculine because of the source language or some shit. Still a lot of people arguing about it.
Native German speaker here but I also speak Spanish, Portuguese, French and Swedish. Each of these languages handles them differently so I am thinking there’s not a general answer here.
It also can depend within each language on some context. For example in German many neologisms are automatically neuter (das) unless they happen to resemble some common pattern. For example a lot of German words that end with an -e are feminine and sometimes that is applied to neologisms too.
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.
As an insider to gendered language it feels like the stupidest idea ever to make non-gendered language gendered and call it inclusion or whatever they call it.
This is just a guess since the above comment appears to come out of nowhere and doesn’t explain further.
In gendered languages, there are often gender-neutral words, but some people say that it is sexist and demand a female form for that word, making it gendered.
For example in Spanish, “médico” (medical doctor) used to be the only word for both men and women, but since it looks like a masculine word (because it ends in “o”) people complained about it and made “médica” for women. So before we had “El/la médico” and now we have “El médico” and “la médica”.
In my opinion this is such a double standard because it is only done with words that appear masculine. For example “pianista” (player of piano) is feminine looking but gender neutral (so you can say “El/la pianista”).
I’m not arguing there is good reason and thoughtful context haha, I’m certain of that. Just makes learning a mess if you’ve not encountered it beforehand lol.
You clearly use one gendered language, at least. Yes - English is a gendered language, you’ll be surprised to learn. It just so happens that your language is such a clusterfuck it couldn’t reconcile traditional Latin/German gendered structure, and abandoned most of it.
English is a clusterfuck no doubt about it. I don’t know if losing the gendered portion over time was such a bad thing though. Might’ve made it more accessible in some ways and that helps a language survive I think. But I’m not a linguist and there’s a million other factors too.
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.
Your anglocentric view is common, but also completely wrong - speakers of strongly gendered languages (Latin, German, Portuguese, French, etc) don’t have to remember a word’s gender either, it just comes naturally as you become fluent.
I’m semi-fluent in German and Spanish, and my strategy is guesstimate. I figure that I’ve probably read/heard the word before, so I just test out the genders on it and whichever one “feels more natural” or “sounds less weird”, it’s probably because I’ve heard it that way before, so I go with that.
In Swedish you can figure out the gender of a new word because the phrase hints at what it is. In french there is no such luxury, and even worse, it’s a Bel (sounds like belle which is feminine) avion not a beau(masc.) avion even if avion is masculine…
Lots of french people don’t know the gender of the ocean and other voyel starting words because of that.
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.
And then you also have to get the correct stress on the syllables which are also unguessable. Ask for a banana instead of a banaaaaaaaana and people won’t understand.
Then by that metric, Chinese must be incredibly easy. Simple genders, no articles, simple grammar, no verb conjugation whatsoever, very simple tenses. Probably the easiest language out there!
I didn’t list all possible difficulties. Chinese have this never ending list of very complex characters and probably more subtility that I don’t know of. If it is close to Japanese though, yes the grammar doesn’t seem complicated compared to European languages.
Chinese grammar seems to me to be simpler than Japanese, though I studied Japanese for about a year and have lived here speaking the language daily (primary language at home) for the better part of a decade and have only scratched the surface on Mandarin.
Pronunciation is still incredibly difficult unless you are immersed in it. I’d argue that it’s legitimately one of the most difficult languages to pick up in a classroom simply because of how completely different it sounds in the real world versus on tapes.
If you task your male dogsitter to give your dog a treat while you are away and somebody asks you whether your pet is taken care of during your vacation, you can say: “Don’t worry. When I return, the bone will have been given by the man to the dog.”
English has no shortage of exceptions to "rules" (sometimes the rule only seeming such because it applies to the subset most frequently used rather than the whole set of whatevers). English's most common verbs are irregular. That's not necessarily too crazy (be, have, do/make are often weird in most languages because they resist change the most since they are most used). We have all kinds of things that aren't "correct" (prescriptive view) that native speakers get wrong all the time. "I have went" rather than "I have gone" is one that grates to me, but I accept that language changes. A lot of verbs are also losing their endings and patterns and gradually going to the dominant ~ed ending where previously they did not (Tom Scott has a good video on this).
I think liason is the harder part about trying to transcribe someone's spoken words as a new learner without a good grasp on vocabulary.
At least with French, a lot of those silent letters are a lot more predictable than English. English has French borrowings (from two different time periods), Latin borrowings (some of which were borrowed via Norman or Old French first), Greek, Germanic, etc. and we did various levels of preserving the native spelling. This is neat for etymology and maybe figuring out a word one doesn't know, but kinda sucks for spelling. A lot of words from Normal and Old French are now spelled differently in modern Parisian, but the more recent loans are closer. It's a hot mess.
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