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Trick question, washing machines come in many different genders:
I thought pans came in many different genders
Bi only in two.
Only the first two are genders. The others are psychological illnesses
Edit: /s
found the transphobe
Sorry if my intent wasn’t clear but I wanted to make fun of the transphobic meme
I don’t think that saying there are more than two genders is transphobic… saying the others are psychological illnesses, however…
I was making fun of the concept that there are only 2 genders by applying it to the washing information but I see that this wasn’t obvious
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Die Waschmaschine die
Die Bart die
No one who speaks German could be an evil man.
Gut ausgedrückt.
Ich kenne die Szene, danke.
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Waschmaschine:*
Das ist die Kleidung der Waschmaschine
Ich stehe auf der Waschmaschine
German grammar cannot be trusted
If you get the wrong one just accuse the examiner of being transphobic.
please no baiting trans folk
What a transphobic thing to say.
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Man… This post going over lots of heads.
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Don’t bite the bait pls, reporting in this case is best course of action. Thanks
Sorry you’re being downvoted, I think you’re entirely correct. I hope the other people just don’t realize how jokes that are relativising transphobic experiences like that are downplaying the actual issues trans people are facing.
I wish we would live in a world where we could just crack jokes involving trans people like we do with everything else.
itl be definitely be nice when lgbtq doesn’t need to be a social movement, or a political opinion, just a normal thing in life.
We can, but we have to work for it. When any group is no longer being systemically discriminated and have equal rights, then they’re also valid comedy targets.
Like with racist jokes. They’re fine in very confined groups where everyone agrees that the absurdity of the premise is part of the joke and where nobody will be made to feel unsafe by it. But to a wider audience where people might misunderstand where the joke came from, in what spirit it was told in, it’s nok OK. Not only can it make people from the group being targeted feel unsafe, but it’ll also embolden actual racists who’ll mistake the joke as support of their beliefs.
It’s a trust thing I guess. As soon as trans people can see someone crack a joke about them online and rest assured in the fact that the person telling that joke isn’t voting for or otherwise enabling people who wants to take away their rights or straight up hurt them, then it’ll be fine.
This protection, however, should not apply to people who make it their business to hurt or oppress other people, which is why it’s always open season on nazis.
My thoughts exactly.
But nobody is downplaying it? Yes Trans people face a lot of issues and they really need to be supported in many ways, but I don’t think this joke insinuates any of that.
I do think that comparing a non native speaker using the wrong article with trans people having to fear for their lives sometimes is downplaying it. I don’t think that was the intent with the original comment, which is why I also don’t appreciate the other person’s snappy response. But I do believe those kinds of jokes can subconsciously make people believe things aren’t as bad as they actually are.
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First of all, pretty much anything is political.
Second, I’m not the one to pull transphobia into the context. The joke did that on its own.
Third, I’m looking to have a civil discussion, you’re the one exaggerating things and starting drama by throwing profanities around and accusing me of virtue signalling.
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that would be true in a world without bigotry.
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
*needing to laugh
Oh yeah, unlike French where 2/3 of each word is silent.
I think liason is the harder part about trying to transcribe someone’s spoken words as a new learner without a good grasp on vocabulary.
At least with French, a lot of those silent letters are a lot more predictable than English. English has French borrowings (from two different time periods), Latin borrowings (some of which were borrowed via Norman or Old French first), Greek, Germanic, etc. and we did various levels of preserving the native spelling. This is neat for etymology and maybe figuring out a word one doesn’t know, but kinda sucks for spelling. A lot of words from Normal and Old French are now spelled differently in modern Parisian, but the more recent loans are closer. It’s a hot mess.
liason
Liaison, but also did you mean to use that word there or was it a weird autocorrect?
And then you also have to get the correct stress on the syllables which are also unguessable. Ask for a banana instead of a banaaaaaaaana and people won’t understand.
That’s the only hard thing about English. Many other languages have this difficulty plus many more (gender, tenses, complex rules, exceptions…).
English has no shortage of exceptions to “rules” (sometimes the rule only seeming such because it applies to the subset most frequently used rather than the whole set of whatevers). English’s most common verbs are irregular. That’s not necessarily too crazy (be, have, do/make are often weird in most languages because they resist change the most since they are most used). We have all kinds of things that aren’t “correct” (prescriptive view) that native speakers get wrong all the time. “I have went” rather than “I have gone” is one that grates to me, but I accept that language changes. A lot of verbs are also losing their endings and patterns and gradually going to the dominant ~ed ending where previously they did not (Tom Scott has a good video on this).
English word order is also pretty weird.
“The man gave a bone to the dog”, “The dog was given a bone by the man”, “The bone was given by the man to the dog”, etc etc
These are all valid sentences* expressing the same thing.
*They may not be gramatically correct, I am not a grammar professional
edit: I had forgotten that you can also do that in other languages
I don’t think that’s very specific to English, I could write the same subject swap in French, Spanish and maybe Japanese.
Yeah, we can do it in Japanese. Particles change. Passive voice and subjunctive mood can also be done without too much trouble.
It’s not like you can’t say that in french.
They have almost a hundred ways to conjugate each verb too (even if there are about a hundred groups).
English is a walk in the park compared to French IMO.
If you task your male dogsitter to give your dog a treat while you are away and somebody asks you whether your pet is taken care of during your vacation, you can say: “Don’t worry. When I return, the bone will have been given by the man to the dog.”
Then by that metric, Chinese must be incredibly easy. Simple genders, no articles, simple grammar, no verb conjugation whatsoever, very simple tenses. Probably the easiest language out there!
I didn’t list all possible difficulties. Chinese have this never ending list of very complex characters and probably more subtility that I don’t know of. If it is close to Japanese though, yes the grammar doesn’t seem complicated compared to European languages.
Chinese grammar seems to me to be simpler than Japanese, though I studied Japanese for about a year and have lived here speaking the language daily (primary language at home) for the better part of a decade and have only scratched the surface on Mandarin.
Pronunciation is still incredibly difficult unless you are immersed in it. I’d argue that it’s legitimately one of the most difficult languages to pick up in a classroom simply because of how completely different it sounds in the real world versus on tapes.
Plus every word has like 10 different meanings while other languages sometimes have 10 different words for the same thing.
runis my personal favorite. Run for office, run off a copy, run out of something, run into something, run over something, etc.I don’t necessarily think this is uncommon in language (particularly with the most common ~20 or so verbs).
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
Yep, that’s how I know. The struggle was real for 3 years.
Your anglocentric view is common, but also completely wrong - speakers of strongly gendered languages (Latin, German, Portuguese, French, etc) don’t have to remember a word’s gender either, it just comes naturally as you become fluent.
Nope. You just grow confident to not notice the blunders, and learn to recover fast enough to not persist when it would be detrimental.
Native speakers making mistakes or not caring to stick to the rules is one of the forces behind languages’ evolution.
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I’m semi-fluent in German and Spanish, and my strategy is guesstimate. I figure that I’ve probably read/heard the word before, so I just test out the genders on it and whichever one “feels more natural” or “sounds less weird”, it’s probably because I’ve heard it that way before, so I go with that.
Oh no it doesn’t!
In Swedish you can figure out the gender of a new word because the phrase hints at what it is. In french there is no such luxury, and even worse, it’s a Bel (sounds like belle which is feminine) avion not a beau(masc.) avion even if avion is masculine…
Lots of french people don’t know the gender of the ocean and other voyel starting words because of that.
Have you tried asking the washing machine for its preferred pronouns?
mate, can you please not bait trans folk? thanks
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Easy. Since it’s the womans’ job to do laundry, the washing machine is also female /s
So you mean la bite is …
Un pénis, oui.
Let my wife know
But what if you’re single?
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.
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.
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 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!
There’s some tendencies, but a ton of exceptions. I wouldn’t call It strict rules.
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.
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
Me in my mandarin class not having to conjugate, add pronouns, use words like the and to, and not having words more than 4 syllables. But having to learn 10,000 + characters
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).
It’s like butter in German, which in some regions is female.
Dude, you have it the wrong way around.
It’s like female in German, which in some regions is butter?
Where?
I heard it’s female in the north
Well, what would it be if not “die Butter”? Das? Der?
Der Butter
Nur im Fall von “Gib mir bitte mal ein Stück von der Butter.” :D
I don’t know where it is not female but I am from the north.
Southwest here: die Butter.
Bei den Badenern?
Nein, Saarland.
Like another comment said, in this particular case it even depends which word you use for the machine (une machine a laver, un lave-linge).
More in general, there’s a similar thing between France French and Quebec french where they also invert a bunch of them (un job/une job).
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?
In German, they sometimes add the gender into the word. Like if you hire a few “Stripper” in German, they will be all male, while “Stripperinnen” would be all female and there is no generally accepted way if you want a mix or non-binaries, you’d have to describe it. This can lead to quite a lot of confusion, especially with words derived from English like this.
So what I’m saying is, if you use the English word and misgender, it can be a big deal. Like 7 or 8 inches big, on some occasions.
The example you used involved humans. They were asking about items.
It’s the same. Misgendering any object leads to confusion at best and makes you sound like an utter moron at worst.
Any chance you can help me understand why?
I took German in high school (which was a long time ago) - and yes, I can understand the moron part because if you speak poorly in any language that can happen.
But if I say die bleistift instead of der bleistift, how is that going to confuse someone? Bleistift is still the German word for pencil either way, right? The gendering of inanimate objects always felt very arbitrary to me.
I can explain: it’s not, it’s a lie. Using the wrong gender feels wrong but that’s about it. It’s a common second language learner mistake and it doesn’t make you sound like a moron. With a little luck, you took a gender that’s accepted in other regions of Germany (like die Email is standard while das Email is southern east I think). It’s a mess.
Technically, there are ambiguities but not really like der Leiter the leader die Leiter the ladder and of cause you could find an example where this is really confusing, unless you are a bit patient and have some empathy.
In any case, I have deep respect for everyone who learns the mess that’s my native language and nobody should feel bad for making minor mistakes.
Thanks for the clarification, I appreciate it.
In any case, I have deep respect for everyone who learns the mess that’s my native language and nobody should feel bad for making minor mistakes.
As you are no doubt aware, English is renowned for rules that are rules until they aren’t, and quite a lot of other ambiguities for non-native speakers, so I can appreciate this.
When I talk to someone who is clearly not a native English speaker, and they apologize for their English I usually point out that their English is way better than my (whatever their language is) since without fail it’s not a language I can speak at all. Seems to put people at ease.
To stay with people as an example: die Tänzer would mean plural right? But as an answer to a question, it might be confusing. Let’s assume you’re asked: „Wer war gestern Abend auf der Bühne?“. Assuming both participants know it’s an establishment with either several dancers or one female act, misgendering the female dancer trough omission of the correct ending would lead to confusion, since the false answer would be the same answer as the one being given by someone overwhelmed with gendering: „Die Tänzer“.
That is by definition confusing. Just because you can accommodate for it, doesn’t mean it isn’t initially.
About the moron part: that does really depend as well. I happen to work with a few people who are not German native speakers and tend to be very articulate in English. The way they often misgender common words in German really takes away from their credibility, since it happens so often. Doing it once or twice can be excused, but doing it often does not help you seem intelligent.
In your example, you wouldn’t use the definite article anyway. “Eine Tänzer” could be wrong indefinite article or wrong noun, but unless you aren’t hyper obsessed with gender (of people), it doesn’t matter. “Die Tänzer” would only be used when they were introduced before. That’s how define articles work. Sure, a foreigner could get that wrong, too, but then there are already 2 mistakes and of course, more mistakes make it worse. Also: if it’s established that it’s a dancing establishment, why not ask about “how many dancers” instead? As I said, you can construct cases, but it’s not easy and yours isn’t very good I’m afraid.
About your work environment: I get that it can come across as unprofessional, especially in writing. But in writing you have grammar checks, if you’re lucky (I just checked and libreoffice sadly doesn’t, but maybe with addons and I think MS office (which I’m forced to use at work) has it by default). And if they are viewed as morons in spoken form, I’m sorry to inform you that you work in a toxic environment. My non native colleges never had that problem as far as I know.
And there you are in one of the culture wars discussions we currently have in Germany. While progressives are using gendered nouns specificing which genders you are referring too (for example: Tänzerinnen and Tänzer – often abbreviated Tänzer*innen – if you had female and male dancers, Tänzerinnen if only female and Tänzer if only male), conservatives want to keep the old tradition of making a group of people male once a single male is included.
This has real world implications, though. There are jobs which are often gendered female – typically lower paid jobs like kindergarden teacher or nurse – and others are typically gendered male, like engineer or politican. There have been a couple studies with children where children were asked if their could think of taking a specified job. And if the job gender matched their gender, they were more likely to see themselves suitable for that job. And if you now remember that engineers are typically referred to as male and nurses are typically referred as female, this is one expiation on why Germany has one of the largest uncorrected gender pay gaps in Europe.
The trick is to say the article very fast or very ambiguously, so that all anyone knows is that you didn’t say das.
Grammatical gender is an indicator on how the words are declined in different cases.
der Bleistift der Berg die Waschmaschine die Blume das Schachbrett das Wasser Nominativ der Bleistift der Berg die Waschmachine die Blume das Schachbrett das Wasser Genitiv des Bleistifts des Bergs der Waschmaschine der Blume des Schachbretts des Wassers Dativ dem Bleistift dem Berg der Waschmaschine der Blume dem Schachbrett dem Wasser Akkusativ den Bleistift den Berg die Waschmaschine die Blume das Schachbrett das Wasser Thus, in the case of compound nouns, the noun at the end is what determines the gender: das Blei + der Stift -> der Bleistift.
Also, tables look fucking horrible on mobile. Or is it only me (using Liftoff).
As mentioned in another comment: it shouldn’t be. Youth culture has embraced this in part. However it lacks a certain finesse and makes it difficult for some people to differentiate on whether you wanted to use plural or singular for some people, especially in dialects which tend to omit the ending which would otherwise clarify the gender or singular/plural.
Edit:
Example: „Gibsch ma mal da Bleistift!“ (Singular) „Gibsch ma mal d‘Bleistift!“ (Plural)
Ein Schwabe.
Badner.
Wouldn’t it just be Stripper/Stripperen and Stripperin/Stripperinnen?
But what would a group of male and females be referred to as I don’t think you can switch to the neutral version of Das Stripper. So maybe the answer is that a mixed group is Stripperen since that would be closest to neutral? Duolingo hasn’t covered mixed gender stripper scenarios.
Plural of Stripper is Stripper. You can say Stripper to any group of them, but in the case of having exclusively female strippers, you can also specify that by using Stripperinnen. It’s an option, not a must.
My guess is the default would be the masculine Stripperen for a mixed group
The plural of Stripper is Stripper.
Yeah, German has that as does English. Host vs Hostess, Actor vs Actress, etc. There is a push to only use the male word (I’ve never seen it go the other way). What a lot of people don’t know is that surnames also preserve things like this. Brewer was a male brewer but Brewster was a female one.
You don’t do this with non german words like striper. That’s not how german works.
It sounds very weird and you know immediately it’s a foreigner speaking. When you are fluent the genders just come naturally, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a native making a mistake like that, maybe children.
I wouldn’t correct anyone unless they want to learn though, the noun itself is more important and it carries the meaning across.
This is for Brazilian Portuguese at least.
I can vouch it’s the same for Mexican Spanish.
It’s jarring but obviously completely acceptable from someone learning the language
Yeah, it just sounds off and someone might correct you but it isn’t a big deal.
Every once in a while there are two words that are written the same but have different gender, if you use the wrong article it’ll get confusing for a second and you’ll have to figure out from context what was actually meant.
In spoken language? As other said, you notice and ypu know you don’t talk to native speaker. You might correct them just ao they can learn and carry on.
On exam, which is the contextnof the meme? Pretty aggregious.
If you misgender something you either:
-
Are a native speaker that messed up (but know the correct gender), so either you correct yourself or just continue, since everyone will understand that you messed up and will understand you perfectly.
-
Are learning the language: if the other person is close to you, you’ll be correct to help you learn the language. Else, the other person will notice that you’re not a native speaker and will switch the gender in their head to not discourage you. Unless the other person is an asshole.
There are very few situations where the hearer can’t just correct the gender in their head, so it’s not very serious. I’m talking about Spanish though, idk if in other languages is different.
-
French is just kind of compact (they even have the ‘de’ to un-ambigous things I figure) so sometimes the phrase rolls on but means something completely different, it might work out or not but can be confusing.
My master mistake, at dinner with my SOs family;
Tout le monde veut rentrer dans le moule.
This is the correct version.
Edit: BTW Swedish is the other way around and it’s quite easy to understand even if you missgender.
That must’ve generated some thunderous laughter :D
That’s the most frustrating part about Danish/English. Does saying the wrong article break communication? no, most people won’t notice unless you really linger on it or point it out (you probably wouldn’t hear it half the time in Danish anyways). Does it look fucking stupid and wrong when you write it? yes 🙃
Danish is a gigachad language because they use the incredibly satisfying /ð/ as in ved. I don’t even know exactly what that thing is it’s some kind of an abomination of a velarized laminal approximant and absolutely impossible for any non-native to pronounce.
the soft d? It’s not hard imo, as a non-native. I understand language is mostly muscle memory/training but really it’s just learning how to use the … back? of your throat and tongue to make the right sounds with danish. Most of it requires your tongue to be flat or throat open to some degree.
This all sounds very sexual but I do truly mean it LOL
It would look or sound really stupid and be absolutely incorrect if you have done it in Polish. There is high chance you would be mocked for it.
Informally, no native will ever correct you for misgendering a word - it sounds weird and stunted, but changes little in communicating the sorts of simple ideas I’d imagine a low-proficiency speaker would need to get through.
In a more formal setting, 10/10 times someone will correct you.
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
Really? I’ve seen it at least twice in the last minute.
Me too, but I never heard it.
hang on I’m going to shout it pretty loud
Didn’t hear it lol
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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.
I’m not arguing there is good reason and thoughtful context haha, I’m certain of that. Just makes learning a mess if you’ve not encountered it beforehand lol.
As an insider to gendered language it feels like the stupidest idea ever to make non-gendered language gendered and call it inclusion or whatever they call it.
I don’t know what we’re talking about anymore
This is just a guess since the above comment appears to come out of nowhere and doesn’t explain further.
In gendered languages, there are often gender-neutral words, but some people say that it is sexist and demand a female form for that word, making it gendered.
For example in Spanish, “médico” (medical doctor) used to be the only word for both men and women, but since it looks like a masculine word (because it ends in “o”) people complained about it and made “médica” for women. So before we had “El/la médico” and now we have “El médico” and “la médica”.
In my opinion this is such a double standard because it is only done with words that appear masculine. For example “pianista” (player of piano) is feminine looking but gender neutral (so you can say “El/la pianista”).
reject natural language, return to toki pona
As a speaker of a couple of gendered languages, it absolutely is.
You clearly use one gendered language, at least. Yes - English is a gendered language, you’ll be surprised to learn. It just so happens that your language is such a clusterfuck it couldn’t reconcile traditional Latin/German gendered structure, and abandoned most of it.
English is a clusterfuck no doubt about it. I don’t know if losing the gendered portion over time was such a bad thing though. Might’ve made it more accessible in some ways and that helps a language survive I think. But I’m not a linguist and there’s a million other factors too.
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.
The problem though is when you get into figuring out if it is in the nominative, accusative, dative, or genitive case.
Der Hund can easily be turned into den Hund, dem Hund, or des Hundes if you aren’t careful.
And for the love of God, don’t ask me anything about subjunctive case 😮💨
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.
Does ‘÷’ require 3 spaces?
Except for ; because it’s no fun if there’s not at least one exception.
Semicolon is excepted because it’s effectively a comma, I’d assume.
Are you sure about that? Seems all signs with a dot plus another thingy are concerned:
Doesn’t French have ‘la’ and ‘le’ as well?
Yes, that’s the point. You need to memorize which words go with la and which with le. Or der/die/das for German. Or no articles for Slavic languages but the declination and other words in the sentence (selection of pronouns, forms of adjectives and sometimes verbs) depend on the gender.
It’s machina lavatoria in latin and obviously femal for your grammar.
This easy trick to learn French, learn Latin first :-) !
Thanks, it flew miles over my head.
If I remember correctly from my German class in highschool, the rule of thumb was if it’s an inanimate object use the feminine Die. That was in the mid 90s and I haven’t spoken German since, so that with a grain of salt.
genders of words don’t usually change over time, even if spelling does.
also who told you that rule of thumb? being german, I don’t think it’s accurate at all.
Wrong
The more accurate rules of thumb are based on word endings. -e or -in suggest it’s feminine, -er or -or that it’s masculine, and -chen or -ling that it’s neutral. Such hints only work for about 30 % of words but some are close to 100% accurate.
