Trick question, washing machines come in many different genders:
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Laittakaa meemejä tänne.
- Odota ainakin 2 kuukautta ennen meemin postaamista uudelleen
- Ei selkeän poliittista sisältöä (poliitikoista, poliittisista tapahtumista, vaaleista jne) parempi paikka esim. [email protected]
- Merkitse K18-sisältö tarpeen mukaan
If you get the wrong one just accuse the examiner of being transphobic.
This is my go to response when people are trying to claim that English is hard... Well at least I don't have to remember what gender has randomly been assigned to every noun I want to use.
No, instead you have to learn to read and spell in a system that often sounds quite different to what is written. I want to read a book that's never been read. I want to live a life alive at a live show. Anything ending in ~ough which has something like 6 or 8 different sounds. I'm a native speaker trying to work with my wife on English (we speak Japanese at home). It's insane for any reading/spelling.
Are you through laughing at the English kneading dough in a trough, though?
As soon as I stop hiccoughing and cut this bough
I rarely hear people saying English is hard, except for the pronunciation.
German has this too.
And then, when you're learning French, you have to watch out for words that have a different gender than in German.
la lune - der Mond
le soleil - die Sonne
Have you tried asking the washing machine for its preferred pronouns?
Easy. Since it's the womans' job to do laundry, the washing machine is also female ^/s^
Female in Russian, because the word machine/машина ends with A, and so any machine, from tattoo gun to steam engine is female gendered. I always thought French and German worked in somewhat similar manner?
It works like that in French until you use a different word for the machine.
"Mon ordinateur est une bonne machine". In a single sentence my computer was described with words both male and female.
It's just vocabulary and grammar, not the deep essence or identity of things or people.
I didn't learn of any rhyme or reason to it in German when I took classes on it. In fact, in a few cases, the gender changes the meaning of the word. Der See und die See, for example. One means lake and the other means sea/ocean.
it is in German too.
It is die Waschmaschine. and a Steam Engine ist die Dampfmaschine. And it is a very straight foreard naming convention. Just add what kind of machine it is to the front of the noun.
This one is funny actually! You can say une machine à laver, or un lave linge. :D
Never in my life did I hear the term lave linge
In Spanish it even depends on which dialect you're speaking.
In some places it's "la lavadora" (she/her), and in other places it's "el lavarropas" (he/him).
How aggregious is misgendering items in other languages? I assume it's no big deal and may not even be worth correcting most of the time?
It's jarring but obviously completely acceptable from someone learning the language
It’s probably makes sense once explained properly but as an outsider to gendered languages in general it feels like the stupidest archaic idea ever lol.
Grammatical gender has nothing to do with sexual gender. It is simply the expression on how words are declined in different cases.
Une machine, putain !
Noticed that space after putain ? When the sign has two things, like an exclamation mark or a colon, you put the space in between. Otherwise not !
Sorry for the the frenchification by using the "espace insécable" in the English text.
End-syllables help a long way:
For example the often cited neutral: girl/Mädchen is a diminutive. So everything with -chen or -lein becomes neutral and therefore: das.
(Brötchen, Männlein, Häuschen, Fräulein)
https://mein-deutschbuch.de/genusbestimmung.html#nachsilben
As a bonus: in plural everything is "die" so just formulate everything in plural and you are always right.