• doingthestuff@lemy.lol
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    2 days ago

    As someone who speaks German alright (lived there awhile and studied a few years in school) gendered nouns and all of the versions of “the” are just stupidly laborious and I never cared if I got it wrong. Even if my accent was okay (it wasn’t okay, my US German teacher was Danish and I was sometimes told I sounded Danish) my lack of fucks about der, die, das, dem etc made it very obvious I wasn’t a native speaker.

    All of that said, I found that popup kids book pretty easy to read.

    • Sockenklaus@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      my lack of fucks about der, die, das, dem etc made it very obvious I wasn’t a native speaker.

      I employ many non native speakers and most of them struggle with their articles and are very self conscious about them. They often consider themselves bad speakers because of this and I fear they sometimes talk less because they don’t have the courage to make grammar mistakes.

      I always tell them that I don’t give a fuck about articles. Most of the time they don’t convey any meaning. You can skip them or use a generic “de” to fake any article. For me as an employer it’s more important that you practice talking, get a good vocabulary and have your times (especially Präsens, Perfekt, Futur) straight.🤷

      • Ziglin (they/them)@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        It also makes it annoyingly difficult to talk about other people without people making assumptions about their gender because of an imbalance of male, female and neutral terms in one’s language.

        Also why can’t employees times be qeer? o.o

    • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      English is the weird one of the Indo European languages in dropping grammatical gender. Or if you look at it from Persians perspective, we don’t go far enough because we still have gendered pronouns.