this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
456 points (95.2% liked)
Today I Learned
17707 readers
239 users here now
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Years of research and development and yet no practical use found for words having gender. They have played us for absolute fools!
And worse, even native speakers don’t know them all. It’s 50/50 whether it’s un or une airplane, bus, trampoline…, depending of the speaker.
Am French, can confirm, gendered languages (there are lots of these!) would probably be better without them... But eh, languages in general are not known to be logical and practical. And English is not an exception!
Yeah English is really silly. I can only apologise for through / though / thought etc. The ough did used to make sense in pronunciation, but has long since fallen out of use.
Any good resources spring to mind for learning French btw? I’ve been smashing through Duolingo but it’s a 6/10 at best tbh.
No, sorry, I'm actually French so I would not really have use for these
I know that for English, subscribing to various EN youtube channels helped me a lot, but obviously you need some base level to understand enough of it for it to be useful
Also, I think learning how to write French is wayyy harder than learning to listen, read or even speak French, so I'd advise against really trying to be able to write, and focusing more on the 3 other aspects.
If you have French-related questions, feel free to pm me :)
Some say gender can distinguish between similar-sounding words and what a pronoun refers to.
It's true, at least in French. Because we "concord" (I'm not sure of the translation there) adjectives with the noun, it means that we can understand which adjectives is linked to which noun on complex sentences. Same with some determiners and articles.
A basic example: "Un abricot et des pommes juteuses" (An apricot and some juicy apples) Because in French adjectives comes after the noun, it could apply to either only the apples, or both fruits. But since apricot is masculine, apple is feminine, and "juteuses" is the feminine version of the adjective, we know it applies only to the apples.
But honestly? This feature is not THAT important imo. And it makes gendered languages so much more difficult to learn, even as a native speakers sometimes I misgender some words I'm not used to use.
And my example doesn't even work if both fruits are the same gender, so it's not like it is a critical feature of the language!