this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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[–] Twongo@hexbear.net 1 points 4 hours ago

eh... ce n'est pas trés difficile.

mais je ne suis pas amerikkkain.

[–] UmmmCheckPlease@hexbear.net 35 points 4 days ago (2 children)

The trick (if you’re amerikkkan) is to embrace the fact that you have the foreign language skills of a toddler and enjoy people’s amusement as you butcher their language lol

[–] mathemachristian@hexbear.net 23 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I mean the fr*nch are worse

[–] UmmmCheckPlease@hexbear.net 13 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] Edie@hexbear.net 14 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

Tuna? What about tuna?


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[–] UmmmCheckPlease@hexbear.net 15 points 4 days ago

I know how to tuna piano, but I don’t know how to tuna fish

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[–] grym@hexbear.net 26 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Its funny having French as your native tongue and having internalised all that. Like obviously a machine is feminine.

It can make for fun play on words, imagery and parallels, but it also sucks ass for neutral or degendered language..

[–] Umechan@hexbear.net 26 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Like obviously a machine is feminine

RATM are cancelled.

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 6 points 4 days ago

I think this is basically the position of left-neoliberal "more women war criminals" types

[–] RNAi@hexbear.net 14 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Spanish is more woke cuz El lavarropas

[–] ColombianLenin@hexbear.net 12 points 4 days ago (2 children)

In latinoamerica it's La lavadora

[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Clothes washer transitioned when she moved across the ocean, now she goes by washer.

[–] RNAi@hexbear.net 5 points 4 days ago

Yer calling Argentina crakkkers?

[–] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 10 points 4 days ago

Sometimes it leaks into my English. I default to saying he, the dog.

[–] TraschcanOfIdeology@hexbear.net 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Same with Spanish. Learning Italian was significantly easier than for other people I know for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that the genders are like 95% the same. It helps if you know some Latin, i guess.

Agree on the fuckedness of using neutral or degendered language in romance languages, too.

[–] blunder@hexbear.net 19 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] infuziSporg@hexbear.net 7 points 4 days ago

the bed where the water is

la lit où il est l'eau

[–] SoyViking@hexbear.net 23 points 4 days ago (1 children)

In Danish we have two genders like God intended: Agender and Common Gender (the radical West Jutlanders claims there are no genders at all, don't listen to them)

[–] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 13 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Wait, is it like an animate/inanimate split? We have that too in Czech, except each is also gendered

[–] Edie@hexbear.net 11 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I dont think so?

examplesEn bil (a car, common)
En mand (a man, c)
En kvinde (a woman, c)
En hund (dog)
En kat (cat)
En hest (horse)
En svamp (fungus)
En flaske (bottle)
En lampe (lamp)
En stol (chair)

Et hus (a house, neuter)
Et bord (a table, n)
Et barn (a child, n)
Et træ (tree)


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[–] XxFemboy_Stalin_420_69xX@hexbear.net 21 points 4 days ago (1 children)

it's masculine because it's a compound word, which are all masculine in french. easy peasy

also grammatical gender and real life gender have nothing to do with each other. grammatical gender is more like a class or group that nouns fall into

[–] lil_tank@hexbear.net 21 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I think you mixed up dishwasher and washing machine? Respectively, un lave-vaisselle, une machine à laver

[–] XxFemboy_Stalin_420_69xX@hexbear.net 8 points 4 days ago (2 children)

i was thinking of lave-linge for washing machine actually. no idea how common that is compared machine à laver or if that's a france vs. canada thing

[–] grym@hexbear.net 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

France is typically machine a laver. Might vary by region tho

Actually nevermind I know people who use lave-linge but I associate it as old fashioned for some reason

[–] lil_tank@hexbear.net 6 points 4 days ago

Oh yes lave-linge is totally valid, I didn't think about it because it's less common where I live

[–] Goblinmancer@hexbear.net 22 points 4 days ago (2 children)

why do ships have she/her pronouns

[–] puppygirlpets@hexbear.net 31 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 5 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Then where are their girl bits

[–] Euergetes@hexbear.net 14 points 4 days ago

don't ask a ship what's down her pants

(BL 18-inch Mk I naval gun)

[–] Kefla@hexbear.net 13 points 4 days ago

They don't need bits, they're ships. I can only aspire to be like them

[–] Owl@hexbear.net 12 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Wrong question, the real question is where do girls keep their ship bits.

[–] comrade_pibb@hexbear.net 4 points 3 days ago

what that anchor do

[–] SoyViking@hexbear.net 11 points 4 days ago (2 children)

It is rooted in historical grammar. Old English, like many other Germanic languages, had grammatical gender. As those genders were eventually lost they stuck on in a few places, including for ships.

A similar development happened in other Germanic languages.

Why did ships keep their grammatical gender when most other nouns didn't? I don't know. It could be because of the tradition of naming ships after women, which made sense back when ships did have grammatical gender. It could also be influenced by sailors' superstition and tendency to antropomorphise their ships.

[–] Keld@hexbear.net 19 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Ships are not merely grammatically feminine, they are personified and given a feminine identity. In German ships are neuter, it is das Schiff, yet they are given a feminine identity. (This also goes for some other languages like Danish).

Danish grammarIn Danish the differentiation is between neuter/no gender and gendered. Since Danish collapsed masculine and feminine into one category. So technically a ship could at best be "gendered" grammatically rather than feminine. But it isn't gendered and the ship is still a woman.

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

I genuinely believe the answer is that it's a product of men owning them using them as a sort of status symbol. There is also a tradition of doing the same with guns (like a rifle named "Betsy" or whatever).

[–] Keld@hexbear.net 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Very much one of those "I suspect so, but I can't prove it" things

[–] Keld@hexbear.net 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Also, sorry for double posting but I just looked this up. Ships (Scif) in old english were grammatically masculine, and grammatic gender had nothing to do with cultural gender roles.

Wif, frow and wiffman all mean women and each has one of the 3 possible grammatic genders.

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[–] CarmineCatboy2@hexbear.net 15 points 4 days ago

in portuguese the fatherland is trans

[–] StillNoLeftLeft@hexbear.net 14 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Learning languages with a non-gendered native language has always been wild, but French was always particularly tricky.

[–] huf@hexbear.net 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

my only experience trying to learn a language with gender was german, and i basically never could take it seriously. who cares. i was fully prepared to just call everything das, and fuck it. they lost me at having to make the adjectives agree with the noun. fuck that noise, this is like fake difficulty!

similarly, my friend's dad apparently spoke russian well but with absolutely random gender until the day he died.

[–] anaesidemus@hexbear.net 12 points 4 days ago

it's feminine in Icelandic, typical (although all machines are feminine)

[–] TraschcanOfIdeology@hexbear.net 15 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Try German. Why is bread non-binary bro, why is the moon masculine and the sun feminine!?

[–] RNAi@hexbear.net 10 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Nothing is worse than Das Mädchen

Girls are agender says the nazis

[–] UmbraVivi@hexbear.net 14 points 4 days ago (1 children)

That's because it ends on "-chen". It's a suffix to basically cutiefy whatever comes in front of it and makes every word agender. So like "Der Hund" (the dog) becomes "Das Hündchen" (the doggy). "Mädchen" originally comes from the word "Die Maid", which means young woman but is never used in modern German. So "Mädchen" is basically "girlie", not "girl". Don't ask me why this happened germany-cool

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[–] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 6 points 4 days ago

I personally hate Die/Der See

[–] huf@hexbear.net 5 points 4 days ago (2 children)

bread, i dunno, but the moon is presumably masculine because the man in the moon, Tilion is a man. and the sun feminine because Arien is a woman and she's the pilot of the sun.

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[–] rubber_chicken@hexbear.net 12 points 4 days ago
[–] RedSturgeon@hexbear.net 9 points 4 days ago

You spend hours every day studying cases for the Synthetic language of your choice. Or the one they're forcing you to learn.

Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Instrumental, Prepositional. very-smart

Then oops let me drop all he non-standard vocabulary, that does not follow the rules. maddened

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