Yeah, but in English you don’t go around and label EVERYTHING with the other two genders (only if you’re a bit weird and pretend your car is a she or something) and our they is the same as the female pronoun (sie), which makes that unusable as well.
Yeah, a lot of european languages have a three gender system: masculine, feminine and neuter
Proto-Indo-European, the language which most European (and some South Asian languages) originate from, had a three gender system
Even English used to have a three gender system before it disappeared in the Middle English period
Despite the name, the neuter gender tends to not be used for people, although in some languages (such as Polish) the use of the neuter gender to refer to non-binary people is gaining traction
When I studied German a bit for fun I gave up on trying to memorize the genders and just used “das” for everything. Yeah it’s wildly incorrect but still mostly understandable which is fine for me.
Still mostly only good as a guessing guideline because there’s no real system, just etymological patterns, but yea you can guess more than 33% for sure.
It’s not perfect, no, but I feel like you can identify feminine words based on their endings alone in 90% of cases, and if you can use a few general rules to make masculine/neuter better than a 50-50 guess, you’re already right more often than you’re wrong. Maybe even 75% with no rote menorization whatsoever
Edit: I actually just read masculine is about 2x as common as other genders, so always guessing masculine should take you to 50% alone
You’d love German – there is absolutely zero system or logic behind what word has which of the three genders.
three?!
German is woke
It totally isn’t unfortunately, the gender neutral pronoun (if that’s what it’s called?) doesn’t work for humans.
The neuter pronoun (“it”) doesn’t work for humans in English either.
Yeah, but in English you don’t go around and label EVERYTHING with the other two genders (only if you’re a bit weird and pretend your car is a she or something) and our they is the same as the female pronoun (sie), which makes that unusable as well.
Why not though? Just because it sounds rude or something?
Yeah, a lot of european languages have a three gender system: masculine, feminine and neuter
Proto-Indo-European, the language which most European (and some South Asian languages) originate from, had a three gender system
Even English used to have a three gender system before it disappeared in the Middle English period
Despite the name, the neuter gender tends to not be used for people, although in some languages (such as Polish) the use of the neuter gender to refer to non-binary people is gaining traction
Polish also has three. She, he, it/this.
Polish also distinguishes “oni” (they he) and “one” (they it/she). Probably most sexist language I know
I think most slavic languages in general, not just polish.
Yep. Masculine, feminine, and neuter. It’s annoyingly hard to learn. Plus all the other adjectives and such change to match. It’s wild.
When I studied German a bit for fun I gave up on trying to memorize the genders and just used “das” for everything. Yeah it’s wildly incorrect but still mostly understandable which is fine for me.
Just say d’. It’s not wrong, it’s an abbreviation for whatever it’s supposed to be!
There are some general guidelines, which hold true more often than not: https://germanwithlaura.com/noun-gender/
For example, planets that don’t end with an e and which aren’t Venus tend to be male
Still mostly only good as a guessing guideline because there’s no real system, just etymological patterns, but yea you can guess more than 33% for sure.
It’s not perfect, no, but I feel like you can identify feminine words based on their endings alone in 90% of cases, and if you can use a few general rules to make masculine/neuter better than a 50-50 guess, you’re already right more often than you’re wrong. Maybe even 75% with no rote menorization whatsoever
Edit: I actually just read masculine is about 2x as common as other genders, so always guessing masculine should take you to 50% alone
There are some rules. Some of them are easy. One word ending is always feminine. I don’t remember which tho. which is a shame :/
-ung is always feminin (among others like -keit) and mostly -e but the exceptions are enough that you can’t relax.