this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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Today I Learned
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They call tea "the". The what???
They have played us for absolute fools.
Thé*
ptsd flashbacks intensify
Years of research and development and yet no practical use found for words having gender. They have played us for absolute fools!
And worse, even native speakers don’t know them all. It’s 50/50 whether it’s un or une airplane, bus, trampoline…, depending of the speaker.
Am French, can confirm, gendered languages (there are lots of these!) would probably be better without them... But eh, languages in general are not known to be logical and practical. And English is not an exception!
Yeah English is really silly. I can only apologise for through / though / thought etc. The ough did used to make sense in pronunciation, but has long since fallen out of use.
Any good resources spring to mind for learning French btw? I’ve been smashing through Duolingo but it’s a 6/10 at best tbh.
No, sorry, I'm actually French so I would not really have use for these
I know that for English, subscribing to various EN youtube channels helped me a lot, but obviously you need some base level to understand enough of it for it to be useful
Also, I think learning how to write French is wayyy harder than learning to listen, read or even speak French, so I'd advise against really trying to be able to write, and focusing more on the 3 other aspects.
If you have French-related questions, feel free to pm me :)
Some say gender can distinguish between similar-sounding words and what a pronoun refers to.
It's true, at least in French. Because we "concord" (I'm not sure of the translation there) adjectives with the noun, it means that we can understand which adjectives is linked to which noun on complex sentences. Same with some determiners and articles.
A basic example: "Un abricot et des pommes juteuses" (An apricot and some juicy apples) Because in French adjectives comes after the noun, it could apply to either only the apples, or both fruits. But since apricot is masculine, apple is feminine, and "juteuses" is the feminine version of the adjective, we know it applies only to the apples.
But honestly? This feature is not THAT important imo. And it makes gendered languages so much more difficult to learn, even as a native speakers sometimes I misgender some words I'm not used to use.
And my example doesn't even work if both fruits are the same gender, so it's not like it is a critical feature of the language!