English may be a hot mess but at least we don't have to worry about this nonsense - eviltoast
  • merdaverse@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    While gendered nouns are stupid, I at least appreciate Italian because you can just learn the word and get its gender from the end part of the word. In German, however, it’s completely random and you have to learn the gender with the word.

    • GargleBlaster@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I don’t know what you’re on about. It’s “die Waschmaschine” (washing machine, female), “das Waschmittel” (laundry detergent, neutral) and “der Trockner” (dryer, male).

      Pretty self explanatory /s

      • cygon@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        And after going on Die Toilette (female toilet), you use Das Spulbecken (neutral washbasin) and stand in front of Der Spiegel (male mirror).

        Despite accepting this all as perfectly normal, conservatives still manage to make a stink when someone writes or speaks in a way that addresses two different genders :-S

        • Kühe sind toll@feddit.de
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          9 months ago

          And then there’s also the fabolous gender swap in the kitchen:

          You walk into Die Küche(female kitchen) and after that you come out of Der Küche(male kitchen).

          • pseudo@jlai.lu
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            9 months ago

            TIL In french, we have un amour, single form masculin that turn feminin in the plural form.

        • Kühe sind toll@feddit.de
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          9 months ago

          That’s because of the so called “Dimitutiv”. What it does is basically, it say that the object in queue is smaller version of it. Some examples:

          Der Baum - Das Bäumchen

          Der Junge - Das Jüngchen

          It’s always neutral. The original word is “Die Magd” and the Dimitutiv is Mädchen.

      • Obi@sopuli.xyz
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        9 months ago

        It’s exactly the same in french, I wonder how closely the genders of random things align between the two languages.

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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      9 months ago

      Portuguese and Spanish also have that, to a certain degree, but there are some “trap words”, like mapa (map), which is masculine, and a number of words that don’t end with a/o to easily guess.

      • uzay@infosec.pub
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        9 months ago

        And words that are feminine but are still used with ‘el’ and ‘un’ because they start with a stressed a