• Gabu@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    15
    arrow-down
    8
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Slotos@feddit.nl
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      19
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Nope. You just grow confident to not notice the blunders, and learn to recover fast enough to not persist when it would be detrimental.

      Native speakers making mistakes or not caring to stick to the rules is one of the forces behind languages’ evolution.

    • CookieMonsterDebate@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Oh no it doesn’t!

      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.