Ask Lemmy

not at all. it simplifies the learning experience by quite a bunch.

one of the more confusing is learning other gendered languages where the gender of some object is different to the one in your mother tongue

no, we just learn that "der", "die", "das", "den", "dem" all translate to "the"

If you want to be more confused, you should know that some languages have gendered verbs.

Non-gendered wording isn't exclusive to English, it's mostly other European languages that stick to doing that.

There are some languages that don't even have different words for "he" and "she".

Edit: made the wording less asshole-y

The nouns still are gendered. Only the article is gender-neutral.

Tarzan is a man. He lives in the jungle.

Jane is a woman. She is visiting Africa.

The elephant is a non-named animal. It eats fruits and leaves.

If you really want to know a confusing issue about the English language, just look at the pronunciation of words. It is more or less rule-free, and all over the place. Don't believe me? Try to read the poem "The Chaos" aloud. Even most native speakers need several attempts.

Try Finnish or Hungarian, even their pronouns are genderless.

I'm a Finnish speaker. Nouns aren't gendered in Finnish either, so that's not weird.

Things that do trip me up:

• Pronouns (lack of T/V distinction (i.e. just one "you") and gendered third person)
• Articles (Finnish doesn't have articles as such, so adding them sometimes takes some brainpower)
• so freaking many irregular verbs etc
• seriously what is this orthography even (Finnish grammar may be complex, but the same can't be said of the pronunciation)

Actually, I'm learning French right now and gendered nouns aren't even that much of a problem. I was dreading the numerals more.

Easy, no problems at all. English articles are what breaks my head.

You get used to it. The other way around is likely a lot harder, considering that a new concept is being introduced.

Technically English is my third languge, but also simultaneously my most fluent.

In short, not confusing at all. Because in Chinese (any variation of Chinese) nouns are also not gendered.

Pronouns in Chinese are also not gendered

He = 他 (tā)

She = 他 (tā)

No confusion with pronouns either. My parents constantly say he when refering to a woman, or she when refering to a man, or mix them up while talking about the same person in the same conversation. No me tho, I never get confused. I learned English at like grade 2-3.

Arabic speaker here and now that you mention it, the way sentences can get very long without a way to tell what the fourth "it" in the sentence refers to can be a bit of a pain, as is having to reword said sentences when writing to avoid ambiguity, but what you're thinking of there is declensions more than gendered nouns themselves. I mean gender doesn't hurt to have but it's the fact that in other European languages words change shape depending on their role in the sentence that's making the difference here.

Slavic native speaker here.
Not at all. Much simpler, in contrast with German.

There are few gendered nouns, like a spoke(man/woman/person), act(or/ress), etc.

Not at all, it's easier that other gendered languages since object genders get shuffled up.

Swedish has genders, but not male/female but utrum/neutrum.

These are not really rule bound, and has to be learned word by word.

Some words are even double gendered but means different things depending on what gender is used.

Example

"En borr" / "borren" = a drill / the drill

"Ett borr" / "borret" = a drill bit / the drill bit.

But to answer your question, English is in many ways simpler than Swedish, you can specify any article by just putting "the" in front of it. In Swedish you need to select the proper -en/-et suffix with no real hard snd fast rule.

Where english is annoying is compound words.

"Realisationsvinstbeskattning" is the longest word in the Swedish dictionary, it is made up of three separate words,

Realisation - Sale

Vinst - Revenue

Beskattning - taxation

So the word simply means taxation on sale revenue.

According to Guinness book of world records the longest Swedish from 2006 the longest Swedish word is:

nordvästersjökustartilleriflygspaningssimulatoranläggningsmaterielunderhållsuppföljningssystemdiskussionsinläggsförberedelsearbeten

But that is just ridiculous and looks like it comes from a report for the military where someone made the word because they could and enjoyed languages.

Lets break it down into individual words

nord-väster-sjö-kust-artilleri-flyg-spanings-simulator-anläggnings-materiel-underhålls-uppföljnings-system-diskussions-inläggs-förberedelse-arbeten

I am on mobile and the word would take too long to translate here, but it means

"Preparatory groundwork for the discussion on maintenance systems for materials used in the coastal artillery's flight reconnaissance simulator covering the north western costal sector."

The issue with English for a Swedish speaker is the lack of compound words, making Swedes used to separating compound words when writing. Which can have fun results:

Herrskjorta = mens button down shirts

Herr skjorta = Mr. Skjorta

Kassapersonal = Cashier

Kassa personal = terrible staff members

It’s not confusing at all, except in the very specific case of nouns referring to people or animals that don’t have gendered variants.

For example, in my language, the word corresponding to “(a) sheep” has a masculine and feminine form, with the feminine used neutrally. Consequently, when seeing “sheep” in English, I assume the feminine and seeing it used with “he” is a bit of cognitive dissonance.

Similarly, most words for human professions are by default masculine.

There used to be Doctor/Doctrix, actor/actress, etc but it has gone by the by in the last few decades. There’s still dog/bitch, ram/ewe, cow/bull etc.

Not a problem at all for me.

Some of them are, which is even more confusing.

I find the lack of capitalisation to be worse honestly. A lot of sentences where it is not clear at first whether something is a noun or not

English is missing quite a few grammatical features that are necessary for understanding of a German sentence. The genderedness (lolwat is that a word?) nouns helps recognise references, as does ~~declination~~ declension of nouns. German (as presumably other languages do) also uses a LOT more commas than English to structure sentences. So if you know what to look for, it can be very easy to parse even a complicated German sentence because everything has a signal attached telling you what it's doing in that sentence.

Obviously language can work perfectly fine without those features or English wouldn't exist. Still, there are frequently sentences in English that would have to be reworded quite heavily to lose their ambiguity, such as when there are several "it"s referenced and you have to take half a second to figure out which one is which. That's when I do sometimes miss my native language's features - but it's also when native English speakers struggle.

Edit: declination vs declension. Go away, I just woke up lol

About as confusing as some people being nongendered. You get used to it pretty quickly, and it becomes a non-issue.

For the most part I don't think about it at all. I guess you only consider things when they cause extra effort, in this case it mostly doesn't so it's very unconscious. That said, I generally use the few gendered ones I know (I listed in another comment) because it is the way my native language works.

By the way, from grammar perspective English is a very simple language. Compared to similar languages (French, Italian etc.), for example, verbs are much simpler too. The harder part of English I think has to do with pronounce.

Not all other languages have gendered nouns. Articles and affixes are usual points of pain I see (as someone who grew up in a monolingual English-speaking household), and of course the whole orthography mess with spelling is terrible (how can ough have like 6 or 8 pronounciations?!). If you want fun, some languages have distinctions between inanimate and animate things as well as cases that don't exist in English as well if you want to look in fun other features.

Edit: I meant to say prepositions. Affixes is often more in the other direction

Not confusing at all, Spanish and English are very flexible languages

Not.

English is a very straigh forward to learn language.

Now, an English native speaker learning a gender declining language... oh, how fun to watch.