this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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[–] carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone 34 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

i mean, no, the reason english is the default language of the world is due to (british, and then american) imperialism

french and latin were once the default languages of europe for the same reason

and how hard a language is to learn is kinda irrelevant, because it will always depend on what language(s) you already know. for monolingual speakers of english, it’s hard to learn a language with grammatical genders, but if you already speak a language with those, that won’t be a problem

[–] glorkon@lemmy.world 29 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

"for monolingual speakers of english, it’s hard to learn a language with grammatical genders, but if you already speak a language with those, that won’t be a problem"

Not necessarily. I'm German and I still have to learn French grammatical genders by heart, because they don't necessarily match ours. Familiarity with the concept doesn't make it any easier, just less weird.

Example: The tower. LA tour, feminine. DER Turm, masculine.

[–] fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone -2 points 3 days ago (2 children)

That's more of a Germanic vs Latin languages. Most genders on french and Spanish match.

[–] owsei@programming.dev 8 points 2 days ago

What? no

I know portugueses and spanish and I'm learning french and it make it all even more complex

Since in one language it's something, in anofher it's something else

[–] jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Lol, they don't even match consistently between Portuguese and Spanish which are much closer, even when the noun is literally the same (e.g.a água vs el água)

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

They don't even match between Austrian German and German German.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 18 points 3 days ago (1 children)

but if you already speak a language with those, that won’t be a problem

Tell me you are a monolinugal English speaker without telling me.

The problem is not wrapping your mind around the concept of grammatical genders, but that you have to memorize them for every word. And they are different in any language with grammatical gender.

For example:

  • Italian: La luna (female), il sole (male)
  • German: Der Mond (male), die Sonne (female)

or

  • German: Das Huhn (neuter)
  • Italian: il pollo (male)
  • Spanish: la gallina (female)

Knowing the grammatical gender of something in one language won't help you one bit when learning another language. In fact, it might be even detrimental, because it's different in every language.

[–] carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 days ago

Tell me you are a monolinugal English speaker without telling me.

tu penses mon nom d’utilisatrice vient de quelle langue?

of course not every language has the same grammatical genders, but if you already speak a language with them, you don’t have to learn the concept, you already get it

when learning Spanish in school, grammatical gender was really not an issue, cause i already speak french (to be fair, french and spanish will often gender the same words the same way, which greatly helps ofc)

to me, it was much harder to grasp the distinction between ser and estar, for example. two fundamental verbs that, in french, get translated to the same thing

[–] owsei@programming.dev 5 points 2 days ago

The ideia of gramatical gender is kept, but the specific genders may be different, so it's still pretty hard

At least that's how I felt when learning spanish or french

[–] SRo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 days ago

lol that's just so blatantly wrong