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Genders between Romance Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| crackpot Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6302 days ago 144 posts - 178 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 9 of 12 30 May 2010 at 1:50am | IP Logged | ||
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I agree that it is in the 80-85% range. Since identifying the gender in Spanish is much
easier than in French this is one advantage to learn Spanish first. My French is better than my Spanish but I still fall back to my Spanish at times if I can't recall a French gender. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| LtM Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5861 days ago 130 posts - 223 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German | Message 10 of 12 30 May 2010 at 4:36am | IP Logged | ||
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It gets interesting on those (admittedly rare) occasions where, after you internalize the gender of an item, you then discover that in other languages it's different. My first target language was Spanish, so those are forevermore the genders that I “feel”, and when they differ across languages, it sometimes tries my patience to memorize them. Take for instance “knife”, “fork”, and “spoon”. The first two are, quite logically to me, masculine, and a spoon is, again totally logically to me, feminine. And that's how they are in Spanish. But in in German a knife is neuter and a spoon is masculine. And in both German and French a fork is feminine. How dare they! ;)
EN knife ------ fork -------- spoon ES el cuchillo el tenedor la cuchara FR le couteau la fourchette la cuillère DE das Messer die Gabel der Löffel Nevertheless, I wouldn't worry about having trouble with gender across Romance languages (and of course German is not even a Romance language). I'd just advise you not to begin two (or more) Romance languages at the same time. Spend enough time learning one to get past the beginning stage before you start another, and you shouldn't have too much trouble. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6473 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian | Message 11 of 12 31 May 2010 at 5:35pm | IP Logged | ||
huh? Edited by furrykef on 31 May 2010 at 5:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Declan1991 Tetraglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6440 days ago 233 posts - 359 votes Speaks: English*, German, Irish, French | Message 12 of 12 31 May 2010 at 6:53pm | IP Logged | ||
1 person has voted this message useful |
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