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As Someone Learning German, I Know This Pain
(lemmy.tf)
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this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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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.
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.
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.
There's more shenanigans with "umfahren" and "umfahren", where Intonation matters. One means "drive around", the other "run over".
Also one is a strong and one is a weak verb, meaning that in certain cases, one will be split apart:
Ich umfahre jemanden: I drive around someone.
Ich fahre jemanden um: I run someone over.
That's a rather rare occurence. Most often, only the grammar will be incorrect if you use the wrong article.
OMG, I've been doing my Duolingo lessons and never realised that they had different meanings, I just thought Germans used one word for all bodies of water 😭
"Die See" denotes an ocean, "der See" denotes a lake. You will more often hear "das Meer" instead of "die See" tho.
i don't recall there being any rhyme or reason to gender in german, but it's been many years since i studied. i do remember that the gender of any word like ____-machine would be whatever the gender is for machine.
Native German speaker here, can confirm yes, there are some patterns but mostly the genders are pretty random; but a Waschmaschine is feminine because a Maschine is feminine, yes
thank you for confirmation!
The only actual rule I'm aware of is diminutives (i.e. words ending in -chen or -lein) always being neuter (das). This is also the reason why it's das Mädchen (girl) and das Fräulein.
The rest is arbitrary, and sometimes there's even regional variations.
Also a neverending discussion around some "newer" words or brands such as Ketchup, Nutella, etc.
There's some tendencies, but a ton of exceptions. I wouldn't call It strict rules.
Spanish, Italian and Portuguese do, i believe... French has some rather... Unusual conventions i think, not matching the rest
In French "machine" is feminine like in the other languages.
The general rule of thumb in French is the word is feminine if it ends with "-le" like "la table", the table is feminine with it the article "la" to denote feminine. But this is not always the case. For example, house in French is "la maison" which doesn't end in "-le".
As a french I never heard about this, and I can think of way more words contradicting it than confirming it. I wouldn't use it.
In Italian there is il tavolo, male, and la tavola, female. The latter can also be used to refer to a sheet of, usually, wood.
I am sorta learning French on Duolingo (and took 2 years in high school).
Articles like this one are really helpful, but also show the difficulty in learning the gender of nouns: How to easily guess the gender of French nouns with 80% accuracy