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How to cope with genders? | ||
Tags: Gender | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| tibbles Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5192 days ago 245 posts - 422 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean | Message 9 of 33 25 August 2011 at 6:54am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I don't see how gender improves understanding or allows a language to be less order dependent. Gender is just an arbitrary classification system for nouns. Of course you have to use gender correctly to sound right in a language that values gender, but a sentence that violates gender agreement can still be understood (though be annoying to native speakers). The wikipedia page on grammatical gender has a tiny section that tries to explain why gender arose. But after reading that, I still feel that gender is a redundant and obsolete language trait. There's nothing wrong with that. That's the beauty of languages, and if I am learning a language that uses gender, then I will happily learn the gender. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5210 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 10 of 33 25 August 2011 at 7:12am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Jazzboy.bebop: Thanks for the link to the app; I've bought the full version, and will try it soon.
Eyyamguder: I too have problems remembering the genders. Originally tried using Le truc de genres, but found I needed something with examples of the "rules" rather than just the exceptions. Saul H Rosenthal's The Rules for the Gender of French Nouns fitted the bill. I've posted a bit about it on my log here on HtLAL. But the app that Jazzboy mentioned looks like a very promising resource too, and may save me from having to transfer further examples from Rosenthal to my Quizlet/Flashcards++ sets. Kmart and Solfrid Cristin, the advice about always learning the articles with their nouns is sound advice that I've also previously been given. Alas, (i) it's sometimes all my brain can do to cobble up the noun itself; and (ii) for beginners like myself, le and la for many nouns often seem equally probable. - We don't have enough exposure to the language yet to have that sense - when memory fails - as to whether or not it sounds "right". - Which is where little tricks and aids like general "rules" can help. Edited by songlines on 25 August 2011 at 5:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5561 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 11 of 33 25 August 2011 at 5:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I assume for native speakers, learning genders has zero cost. Have you ever forgotten the sex of one of your friends, aquaintances, or even any of the zillions of people whose name you only heard once in your life? You would forget their names before you forgot their sex. You probably know people whose name you've never even known, but you know there sex. Now I know there are concrete differences between men and women, but I don't see why the brain shouldn't be able to use the same categorising capability with simple nouns. Now if your little treasure/monster spends all morning playing with 30 other treasure/monsters at Kindergarten, then when he comes home to tell you what he did, it probably goes like: "I was playing with X and Y and Z. He did this to her, and the she did that to him, the she did something else to her, then he..." It should be easier to keep track of what's going on than if it was: "It did it to it, then it did it to it, then it...". It should reduce the confusion by at least 50%. edit: who's -> whose! Edited by schoenewaelder on 25 August 2011 at 5:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Dr. POW Groupie Canada Joined 4966 days ago 48 posts - 58 votes Studies: German, English* Studies: French | Message 12 of 33 25 August 2011 at 8:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Shouldn't grammatical gender come naturally simply by getting really familiar with the
language? I mean, yes, you have to learn noun endings, exceptions, and all of that, but you wouldn't you get familiar enough with those to just recall the gender of a noun off your tongue. What about obscure words? Maybe there's a scientific term (but they probably all have predetermined endings for genders anyway) or a word without a certain special ending that is very seldom used. Would a native French speaker know the gender of "kaléidoscope" or "poulpe", and what about nouns that are always plural (meaning you would only be able to tell the gender from a declined verb when reading) such as "meubles". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 13 of 33 25 August 2011 at 9:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
You misunderstood me there, I meant that not being able to automatically parse the way gender is expressed in the surrounding words diminishes comprehension. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| unmaad Tetraglot Newbie India Joined 6177 days ago 38 posts - 52 votes Speaks: Bengali*, English, GermanC2, Hindi Studies: Japanese | Message 14 of 33 26 August 2011 at 7:39am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think you missed the point. When you refer to clearly distinguished masculine and feminine entities (like boys and girls) then gender is not only useful, but it is a part of the information flow. You cannot drop it as you are using it as a direct reference to the subject (or object) and not just as a syntactical tidbit. As for names, confusion might arise in case of some names which are used by both sexes (mostly nicknames). But then again the names are directly associated with entities which cane be clearly and visibly distinguished according to their sexes. The whole thing changes when you are attaching gender to entities which are not so clearly distinguished. For example, in German, knife, fork and spoon has three different genders (das Messer, die Gabel and der Löffel). This has no bearing on sexes, neither on appearances. It is in these cases where gender (at least apparently) complicates things without any clear purpose. It is even worse when the same entity has different gender in different languages (even if they are in the same family or sumtimes same sub-family). For example, the English noun House is masculine in Italian (el duomo), feminine in Spanish (la casa) and neutral in German (das Haus). 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Kartof Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5067 days ago 391 posts - 550 votes Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish Studies: Danish | Message 15 of 33 26 August 2011 at 7:57am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I know this isn't the case in many languages, such as in German, but in Bulgarian, gender largely depends on the
ending of the noun, with many exceptions of course. This means that the three genders are really mostly groups of nouns that take on the same definite article due to noun endings in order for the system to be harmonized. For example, one of the exceptions, баща (bashta), meaning father, ends in an -a meaning that it should be a feminine noun and take on the -та (-ta) ending for definiteness. However, it's a masculine noun since it means a male person but it still takes -та as an ending. This is called the rhyming principle in which nouns in Bulgarian tend to take on definite articles that rhyme with their last letter if that last letter is an a or o. This takes precedence over the assigned gender of the noun and what gender the adjectives are given. I'm not sure if it's linguistically accurate to say this, but gender probably originated in languages as a simple classification system based on sounds in the words and various inanimate objects were given their respective genders based on which gender male and female figures fell into, баща being an exception since it came into Bulgarian through Turkish when the gender system was already long established in Bulgarian and most other Indo-European languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5561 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 16 of 33 26 August 2011 at 3:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Once the persons being discussed have been established (X,Y and Z) there is no further benefit to the information flow to keep referring to their gender. If I am talking about my friend X, then once I have mentioned hs name and established his gender, there is no reason to mention it ever again. I can call him "it". However, if we are talking about several people, either I have to keep mentioning them by name, or, if I use gender marked pronouns, it will often be clearer who I am talking about.
Their actual genders are irrellevant. Let's stop calling them genders and call them noun classifiers. I am just saying it enables me to use pronouns, which will help identify who/what I am talking about.
Useful example. You are having lunch with your little treasure/monster. You can now say: "Now hold it in your right hand and her in your left hand... no, no, not him, he's for pudding...put him down now...no no it in your right hand, no don't scratch the table with her, no, do not eat your peas of it, use her..... ok lets use him after all, in fact you may as well have your pudding on the same plate." Once the objects have been established, they can be referred to by their pronouns. Languages seem to prefer to use pronouns rather than keep repeating nouns (there's another question there, of course), so this is an advantage in having separate noun categories. The more you have, the clearer it will be what you are talking about, although there will be diminishing returns. The reason why two or three are usually the resul, is because of the association with natural human gender classification (plus "other"). Now this may seem like a pretty unimportant advantage, but it is an advantage, so assuming that for native speekers there is (virtually) zero disadvantage in learning the separate noun classifiers, then there is no reason for them to disappear. edit: oops, got my German genders the wrong way round, plus other embarrassments Edited by schoenewaelder on 26 August 2011 at 5:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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