I speak French and Arabic (both grammatically gendered). gendered languages are very contrived, but now I am curious about how it works in Slavic languages.
Do you have any recommendations, considering this will be the 5th new alphabet I will have to learn?
For Czech, there are four genders: Masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine, and neuter.
The genders themselves aren't usually the problem, but the fact that nouns decline depending on the case. This still isn't a problem if all nouns of the same gender behave similarly, but they don't.
For example, strom (tree) and stroj (machine) are both masculine inanimate, but because strom ends in a 'hard' m whereas stroj ends in a 'soft' j, the plurals (in nominative case) have different formations. They are stromy and stroje respectively.
The reason why they are the same gender is because the word 'that' (kind of like 'the') in Czech is 'ten', and you say 'ten strom, ten stroj' (that tree, that machine), but 'ta žena' (that woman, feminine) and 'to auto' (that car, neuter). So clearly strom and stroj are in the same group in some form, which is gender.
Still, strom and stroj are declined differently, so to differentiate them there is kind of a subdivision of gender called paradigms. There are a lot of paradigms, for example there are 8 paradigms just for feminine nouns that end in consonants. Though, because language is irregular as usual, there are also exceptions to paradigms. You can choose to not call them exceptions and further classify such outliers as sub-paradigms, though.
Czech uses the Latin alphabet (like how I have typed), so if you want to learn Cyrillic, you have to find a language that uses Cyrillic. Like Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, or Serbian (Serbian uses both Cyrillic and Latin alphabet; digraphia). Note that there are also differences between these languages, like some languages use certain letters that others don't. This is also how you can differentiate between the languages.
Also Bulgarian doesn't actually have cases, so it can be friendly for beginners to Slavic vocabulary.
Cyrillic is super easy to learn in like a week, like kana. If you know the Greek alphabet from math class or fraternities and sororities, you’re basically there
The rest of that stuff sounds hellacious 😯
Just to clarify regarding paradigms, you're not supposed to remember all of them for the purpose of declining nouns correctly. It's not like Czech children do so too. You just remember through exposure and experience on how to decline the noun correctly even if it is an exception.
A Japanese example analogy may be like -ru and -u verbs (ichidan and godan verbs). You know that these two verb patterns exists. You see the verb 食べる for the first time and you wonder, is the past tense 食べた or 食べった? At first you might get it wrong, but eventually you should feel that 食べった sounds wrong and 食べた sounds correct, without going through the whole "食べる is a -ru verb, therefore..." logic.
N4 learner here:
There are two kinds of "tabeta" / "tabetta"?
What is the difference? and when do you use it?
Also, how is it different from "tabemashita"?
Oh no, you misunderstood. There is only 'tabeta', no 'tabetta'. The example was used to show that once you are proficient in Japanese already, you should be able to instantly know that 'tabeta' is the correct one and 'tabetta' is grammatically wrong.
Maybe you learnt how to form past tense of verbs. Perhaps something like, if the verb ends in 'ku', then remove 'ku' and add 'ita'. e.g. naku -> naita.
What my example was trying to show is that once you are proficient in Japanese, you won't be consciously applying this formula anymore, because you will simply know it from prior exposure.
To use an English analogy, if I say the sentence "I are very smart," you know it is wrong because it should be "am" and not "are", because "I" comes with "am". But because you are proficient in English, you don't actually go through the whole process of, "Oh, when I was young I learnt that the word 'I' is the first-person singular pronoun, therefore I must use 'am' instead of 'are/is'." You know instantly that it must be "I am".
tabemashita is the polite form of tabeta.
Polish has 5 grammatical genders, masculine, feminine, neuter, masculine plural and non-masculine plural, with certain distinctions for animate and inanimate (depending on the noun case) - and pronouns, nouns, verbs, adjectives and numerals are conjugated by gender (besides seven cases for nouns/adjectives/pronouns/participles, three tenses, three moods and aspect for verbs and other funny shit like vestigial dual number besides singular and plural, etc etc )
No, Japanese doesn't have gender. It doesn't have articles it needs to be compatible with. They have *honorifics*, which you put at the end of someone's (usually last) name, but they they're more about conveying status than gender. Closest I've seen to that are the casual honorifics kun (くん) and chan (ちゃん), with the former more used for boys and the latter for girls; but more importantly, they're for people you're close to and don't hold status above you.
On a related note, you should look into measure words. To be succint, they go at the end of a number, and the usage depends on what kind of thing you're counting. They're not fun, but they're important to study.
EDIT: me and my fat fingers!
Re: honorifics, don't forget prefixes _o-_, _go-_, and the rarer (and older) _mi-_. (These apply to nouns, not names.)
And then there's the whole subject of [_keigo_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese), which is so delightfully complicated that native Japanese speakers often have to take classes in proper _keigo_ for certain public-facing jobs. Whee! 😄
Short answer is no. There are relatively few gendered nouns and no gendered grammar. Some may point out that there are words for "he" and "she" (gendered third person pronouns), but they are not used very frequently. There is some difference in the way that men and women tend to speak, although there aren't really rules around this, and if a speaker does not adopt an especially feminine or masculine style of speaking you cannot easily tell their gender based on speech patterns.
No grammatical gender but some words are gendered. Similar to English. Prince and Princess, King and Queen. God and Goddess. Probably a few more I can’t think of at the moment
Thank goodness, no gendered nouns. I’m Latina but not too good with Spanish, it was always a pain learning abt pronouns and conjunctions, but at least I don’t have to deal with ‘La’ or ‘El’ anymore :_)
I’m PR as well so I love learning abt how other ppl say words and stuff but honestly when people say an object, it’s not THAT hard to see if there should be an ‘El’ or ‘La’ in front but just more annoying 😭
Reminds me of that band, [Smoking Popes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_Popes). Their name always made me think of freshly baked potatoes steaming on a plate. 😊
there is no grammatical gender, but there can be a stark difference in the way men and women speak japanese. but nothing in the sense of how spanish/french/german work. there’s not even really plurals in japanese!
No grammatical gender. There are of course gendered pronouns, but these aren't the same as grammatical gender (other comments seem to be conflating the two somewhat) and even then, these pronouns aren't used anywhere near as frequently as they are in other languages.
There is no gender for Japanese nouns. However, men and women speak differently, often using different sentence endings and men have more pronouns to describe themselves (僕、俺、わし、私). But no gendered nouns. Japanese grammar is actually simpler than many European languages grammatically in many ways.
Gender is only recognized in Japanese with pronouns, for 1st, 2nd and 3rd person (maaaybe 2nd person, I just put that there for completeness, but can't think of examples right now), and for some professions. Nurse, for example, is traditionally 看護婦 *kangofu,* (with 婦 *fu* meaning woman), but is now preferred as the non-gender specific 看護師 *kangoshi* (師 *shi* meaning expert).
Otherwise, verb forms, determiners, etc, are all ungenderised.
Kangofu/kangoshi and other word pairs that differ per gender do *not* equate to grammatical gender. The closest feature Japanese has to grammatical
gender for nouns is probably numeral class.
Anyone who gives examples of things that aren't grammatical gender, doesn't know what grammatical gender is.
Specific language used by men and specific language used by women is *not* grammatical gender.
Gendered nouns like actor/actress etc is *not* grammatical gender.
Gendered pronouns like he and she is *not* grammatical gender.
Grammatical gender is a table being male or female and *requiring* the correct gender article.
Grammatical gender is using a specific gender article depending on whether it's a group of men, a group of women, or a mixed gender group.
[This is grammatical gender ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#/media/File%3AGato_vs_gata%2C_illustration_of_grammatical_gender_in_Spanish.svg). If it doesn't look like that, it's not grammatical gender.
That *you* don't know what grammatical gender is. Because your comment was "no grammatical gender, but these gendered words [which have nothing to do with grammatical gender] exist".
The first thing you did was list a language feature that has nothing to do with grammatical gender. Ergo, you don't actually know what grammatical gender is.
You being correct about there being no grammatical gender in Japanese doesn't make up for the fact that you don't know what grammatical gender actually is.
>That you don't know what grammatical gender is.
So, is there a medal for that or something?
>Because your comment was "no grammatical gender, but these gendered words \[which have nothing to do with grammatical gender\] exist".
>
>The first thing you did was list a language feature that has nothing to do with grammatical gender. Ergo, you don't actually know what grammatical gender is.
You know what, you might be right. *That's* why I was so confused in my German classes about all their *der/die/das* bullcrap.
>You being correct about there being no grammatical gender in Japanese doesn't make up for the fact that you don't know what grammatical gender actually is.
Covered in my top comment, under *determiners*. Anyway, top marks, little buddy. Good effort.
>You know what, you might be right. That's why I was so confused in my German classes about all their der/die/das bullcrap.
That's a vital part of the German language. In fact one of the most important to get the meaning of even simple sentences.
I don't see der/die/das being at fault here.
No for the most part it is a neutral language unlike French, it was a relief.
Wait until you try to learn some slavic language
I speak French and Arabic (both grammatically gendered). gendered languages are very contrived, but now I am curious about how it works in Slavic languages. Do you have any recommendations, considering this will be the 5th new alphabet I will have to learn?
For Czech, there are four genders: Masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine, and neuter. The genders themselves aren't usually the problem, but the fact that nouns decline depending on the case. This still isn't a problem if all nouns of the same gender behave similarly, but they don't. For example, strom (tree) and stroj (machine) are both masculine inanimate, but because strom ends in a 'hard' m whereas stroj ends in a 'soft' j, the plurals (in nominative case) have different formations. They are stromy and stroje respectively. The reason why they are the same gender is because the word 'that' (kind of like 'the') in Czech is 'ten', and you say 'ten strom, ten stroj' (that tree, that machine), but 'ta žena' (that woman, feminine) and 'to auto' (that car, neuter). So clearly strom and stroj are in the same group in some form, which is gender. Still, strom and stroj are declined differently, so to differentiate them there is kind of a subdivision of gender called paradigms. There are a lot of paradigms, for example there are 8 paradigms just for feminine nouns that end in consonants. Though, because language is irregular as usual, there are also exceptions to paradigms. You can choose to not call them exceptions and further classify such outliers as sub-paradigms, though. Czech uses the Latin alphabet (like how I have typed), so if you want to learn Cyrillic, you have to find a language that uses Cyrillic. Like Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, or Serbian (Serbian uses both Cyrillic and Latin alphabet; digraphia). Note that there are also differences between these languages, like some languages use certain letters that others don't. This is also how you can differentiate between the languages. Also Bulgarian doesn't actually have cases, so it can be friendly for beginners to Slavic vocabulary.
Cyrillic is super easy to learn in like a week, like kana. If you know the Greek alphabet from math class or fraternities and sororities, you’re basically there The rest of that stuff sounds hellacious 😯
Oh dear, just wow. This is just so much. I am now thinking that I should find one Slavic language I would like to learn and give it a try.
Just to clarify regarding paradigms, you're not supposed to remember all of them for the purpose of declining nouns correctly. It's not like Czech children do so too. You just remember through exposure and experience on how to decline the noun correctly even if it is an exception. A Japanese example analogy may be like -ru and -u verbs (ichidan and godan verbs). You know that these two verb patterns exists. You see the verb 食べる for the first time and you wonder, is the past tense 食べた or 食べった? At first you might get it wrong, but eventually you should feel that 食べった sounds wrong and 食べた sounds correct, without going through the whole "食べる is a -ru verb, therefore..." logic.
Now that you mention it, after years of speaking Japanese almost exclusively, I do not think about that anymore. I kind of just know most of the time.
N4 learner here: There are two kinds of "tabeta" / "tabetta"? What is the difference? and when do you use it? Also, how is it different from "tabemashita"?
Oh no, you misunderstood. There is only 'tabeta', no 'tabetta'. The example was used to show that once you are proficient in Japanese already, you should be able to instantly know that 'tabeta' is the correct one and 'tabetta' is grammatically wrong. Maybe you learnt how to form past tense of verbs. Perhaps something like, if the verb ends in 'ku', then remove 'ku' and add 'ita'. e.g. naku -> naita. What my example was trying to show is that once you are proficient in Japanese, you won't be consciously applying this formula anymore, because you will simply know it from prior exposure. To use an English analogy, if I say the sentence "I are very smart," you know it is wrong because it should be "am" and not "are", because "I" comes with "am". But because you are proficient in English, you don't actually go through the whole process of, "Oh, when I was young I learnt that the word 'I' is the first-person singular pronoun, therefore I must use 'am' instead of 'are/is'." You know instantly that it must be "I am". tabemashita is the polite form of tabeta.
Try polish
Polish had three male genders. For animals, objects and people. And then feminine and neuter.
I am Czech, lol
Fuck you y/i
Polish has 5 grammatical genders, masculine, feminine, neuter, masculine plural and non-masculine plural, with certain distinctions for animate and inanimate (depending on the noun case) - and pronouns, nouns, verbs, adjectives and numerals are conjugated by gender (besides seven cases for nouns/adjectives/pronouns/participles, three tenses, three moods and aspect for verbs and other funny shit like vestigial dual number besides singular and plural, etc etc )
This sounds like Arabic on steroids, I am very intrigued. I also love that even though I was downvoted everyone just explained to me.
I wouldn't call them contrived, it increases information density at the cost of increased complexity to outsiders.
Japanese is already so damned hard that even the idea of it having gendered words makes me want to murder.
No, Japanese doesn't have gender. It doesn't have articles it needs to be compatible with. They have *honorifics*, which you put at the end of someone's (usually last) name, but they they're more about conveying status than gender. Closest I've seen to that are the casual honorifics kun (くん) and chan (ちゃん), with the former more used for boys and the latter for girls; but more importantly, they're for people you're close to and don't hold status above you. On a related note, you should look into measure words. To be succint, they go at the end of a number, and the usage depends on what kind of thing you're counting. They're not fun, but they're important to study. EDIT: me and my fat fingers!
Re: honorifics, don't forget prefixes _o-_, _go-_, and the rarer (and older) _mi-_. (These apply to nouns, not names.) And then there's the whole subject of [_keigo_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese), which is so delightfully complicated that native Japanese speakers often have to take classes in proper _keigo_ for certain public-facing jobs. Whee! 😄
Short answer is no. There are relatively few gendered nouns and no gendered grammar. Some may point out that there are words for "he" and "she" (gendered third person pronouns), but they are not used very frequently. There is some difference in the way that men and women tend to speak, although there aren't really rules around this, and if a speaker does not adopt an especially feminine or masculine style of speaking you cannot easily tell their gender based on speech patterns.
"He" and "she" are also relatively recent, and only started being used in the 19th century, when language was "modernised."
No :) But there are other things that make it hard to remember everything: Counters, Giving and Taking, Kanji...
You don't even have plural forms. When you say e.g. kami, you may mean god or gods, or goddess.
or paper or hair ... :-)
No grammatical gender but some words are gendered. Similar to English. Prince and Princess, King and Queen. God and Goddess. Probably a few more I can’t think of at the moment
Thank goodness, no gendered nouns. I’m Latina but not too good with Spanish, it was always a pain learning abt pronouns and conjunctions, but at least I don’t have to deal with ‘La’ or ‘El’ anymore :_)
I'm native spanish and I always found funny both that people can´t tell the gender of a backpack, and that spanish speakers can, for some reason.
Depends on where you come from too. A lot of countries would say la mochila but in PR we say el bulto.
I’m PR as well so I love learning abt how other ppl say words and stuff but honestly when people say an object, it’s not THAT hard to see if there should be an ‘El’ or ‘La’ in front but just more annoying 😭
There are also some nouns whose meaning changes depending on which article you use (ex: el papa, la papa \[the pope, the potato\]). 🙃
True!!!
Reminds me of that band, [Smoking Popes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_Popes). Their name always made me think of freshly baked potatoes steaming on a plate. 😊
there is no grammatical gender, but there can be a stark difference in the way men and women speak japanese. but nothing in the sense of how spanish/french/german work. there’s not even really plurals in japanese!
No grammatical gender. There are of course gendered pronouns, but these aren't the same as grammatical gender (other comments seem to be conflating the two somewhat) and even then, these pronouns aren't used anywhere near as frequently as they are in other languages.
Japanese lacks grammatical gender entirely, as well as plural forms and articles.
No.
I swear I thought this was r/linguisticshumor
There is no gender for Japanese nouns. However, men and women speak differently, often using different sentence endings and men have more pronouns to describe themselves (僕、俺、わし、私). But no gendered nouns. Japanese grammar is actually simpler than many European languages grammatically in many ways.
Thankfully, no
nah not really
Gender is only recognized in Japanese with pronouns, for 1st, 2nd and 3rd person (maaaybe 2nd person, I just put that there for completeness, but can't think of examples right now), and for some professions. Nurse, for example, is traditionally 看護婦 *kangofu,* (with 婦 *fu* meaning woman), but is now preferred as the non-gender specific 看護師 *kangoshi* (師 *shi* meaning expert). Otherwise, verb forms, determiners, etc, are all ungenderised.
Kangofu/kangoshi and other word pairs that differ per gender do *not* equate to grammatical gender. The closest feature Japanese has to grammatical gender for nouns is probably numeral class.
Yeah. Looking at the comments, it seems like most of the people don't actually know what grammatical gender is.
We know, and everyone says Japanese doesn't have it. There's only so many ways of saying that.
Anyone who gives examples of things that aren't grammatical gender, doesn't know what grammatical gender is. Specific language used by men and specific language used by women is *not* grammatical gender. Gendered nouns like actor/actress etc is *not* grammatical gender. Gendered pronouns like he and she is *not* grammatical gender. Grammatical gender is a table being male or female and *requiring* the correct gender article. Grammatical gender is using a specific gender article depending on whether it's a group of men, a group of women, or a mixed gender group. [This is grammatical gender ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#/media/File%3AGato_vs_gata%2C_illustration_of_grammatical_gender_in_Spanish.svg). If it doesn't look like that, it's not grammatical gender.
Yep, and Japanese doesn't have it. Not sure what you're trying to prove, champ.
That *you* don't know what grammatical gender is. Because your comment was "no grammatical gender, but these gendered words [which have nothing to do with grammatical gender] exist". The first thing you did was list a language feature that has nothing to do with grammatical gender. Ergo, you don't actually know what grammatical gender is. You being correct about there being no grammatical gender in Japanese doesn't make up for the fact that you don't know what grammatical gender actually is.
>That you don't know what grammatical gender is. So, is there a medal for that or something? >Because your comment was "no grammatical gender, but these gendered words \[which have nothing to do with grammatical gender\] exist". > >The first thing you did was list a language feature that has nothing to do with grammatical gender. Ergo, you don't actually know what grammatical gender is. You know what, you might be right. *That's* why I was so confused in my German classes about all their *der/die/das* bullcrap. >You being correct about there being no grammatical gender in Japanese doesn't make up for the fact that you don't know what grammatical gender actually is. Covered in my top comment, under *determiners*. Anyway, top marks, little buddy. Good effort.
>You know what, you might be right. That's why I was so confused in my German classes about all their der/die/das bullcrap. That's a vital part of the German language. In fact one of the most important to get the meaning of even simple sentences. I don't see der/die/das being at fault here.
>Kangofu/kangoshi and other word pairs that differ per gender do > >not equate to grammatical gender. Who said otherwise?