I wish there was a way to tell the app that I don’t give a shit. Even if I learn all the genders perfectly, I’m still going to be fumbling over words in an American accent. A few incorrect “der”s are not going to make me unable to be understood. And I can correct that later.
Going beyond that, not knowing noun genders would start getting in the way pretty quickly:
1. It would almost certainly imply not knowing plurals [since patterns for forming plurals heavily rely on noun genders].
2. It would cause declensions getting mixed up [since those also depend on gender]. All of a sudden, understanding who is the subject and who is the object could get pretty hard.
3. It would make it hard to reliably refer to previously mentioned things without repetition.
Does Duolingo teach patterns for recognising genders and forming plurals? If it doesn't, it's absolutely worth learning them on your own. There are a few patterns that cover the vast majority of nouns. There are weird cases and exceptions, but those are relatively few and really stick out once one knows the patterns, making them easier to remember.
Similarly with verb conjugations. Is it she who is doing something, or is it they? Unless the verb is in the correct form, it's impossible to tell.
(I am a student of German rather than a native speaker, so take all of this with a grain of salt.)
There are a few applications out there that are far superior for me, that don’t focus on this two way feedback. Language transfer is amazing, glossika used to be amazing (still is, but they have a lot of grading by default now), pimsleur and Michel Thomas are also good products.
I’m also working on a product that explicitly tries to avoid this problem as well, but is a little meatier than the audio only products like I mentioned above. Won’t be ready for public use for a few months though but you can DM me for details if you’d like
Also added contact details to my about page here in case that didn't go through / got sent to spam
She's never going to be truly fluent, her only objective is to learn enough to function in a place where that's the spoken language. You can get a lot of the grammar wrong and still be understood and that's all that matters to her. She's actually ended up learning *English* grammar from it--English is not her native language and she's missed plenty of things where she understood it but failed to put it in proper English.
If anything, botched grammar can be an advantage--it lets the person they are speaking with know their ability with the language is poor and thus encourages them to keep answers as simple as possible. (This only helps if the person has some experience in trying to communicate through a language barrier, though.)
This is a two way street. A couple word order mistakes are much worse than occasional spelling mistakes in English. The phonology is similar enough that /k/ for /x/ (Loch "hole") shouldn't be a problem, for example. This differs of course with languages that have a completely different speech riddim and phonemes which are unknown to the recipient.
But they also pointed to an unsung advantage - no one really cares if you speak it poorly.
Surely this is just a consequence of that fact that the majority of the world's English speakers speak English as a second language. As a native English speaker you're constantly hearing people speak bad English, so you're naturally somewhat desensitized.
> As a native English speaker you're constantly hearing people speak bad English, so you're naturally somewhat desensitized
Reading middle and old English, I feel the onus is on you because it changed so much :')
No, it's the same. I'll just switch to English.
> I can see why communities like Turkish one are often considered as having failed to integrate in Germany
Das ist kulturel bedingt. Duolingo hätte jedenfalls nicht viel geholfen.
No it's not the same. My German girlfriend is consistently asked in Germany where she's "really from" despite being born there and living there her whole life (and her parents too!). That would be scandalous in my country, and the US too. The intolerance of imperfect grammar that can realistically only be attained by natives is adjacent to this issue. It's naive and simplistic to just state all Western countries are the same in terms of social progress. The English-speaking and German-speaking worlds are not the same.
>Das ist kulturel bedingt. Duolingo hätte jedenfalls nicht viel geholfen.
For sure. German culture will either change of I am sure that these waves of immigrants will not integrate properly and there will be strife. One of the benefits of immigration I hope is that Germany will change and become a friendlier and less inward looking society.
And no we really don't care, or at least I don't. I am a native English speaker who goes months at a time without speaking to another native English speaker. I would never judge someone for it. I would be ashamed of myself to just stop listening to someone for mixing up word order slightly or dropping a preposition or picking the wrong conjugated form of a verb. If I understand them, then it's fine. If I can help them improve their English, by pointing something out, I will. It's because I'm not an arsehole. Ignoring someone as soon as they mess up a verb conjugation is honestly detestable.
The difference between "der and dem" is NOT gender mistake. And it is also less noticeable as treating the masculine word famine, due to the way it affects other words.
English doesn't have gender or anything but a vestige of a case system, but it's still just as complex a language as German. Your comment that you wrote right there is simply incorrect English at worst and unidiomatic at best, and you made a number of grammatical mistakes, but I wouldn't think to ignore you for it, because that would be completely ludicrous. In fact I'm only even mentioning it because of the conversation topic at hand. And if you're making so many mistakes whilst writing English then I'm certain you're making loads whilst speaking it. Still wouldn't ignore you or discount what you're saying because of it. In fact I wouldn't care at all because I understand that learning a language is not easy.
Gender in gendered language matter, unfortunately. The best advice I heard is to always memorize the word with its gendered article. (assuming language has articles)
For written language yes, spoken it doesn't really matter as people will cut you a lot of slack.
In Spain there was a football comentator from England, Michael Robinson. Robinson had an obvious English accent and even though his Spanish was very very good, but he still he messed some things -including genre- and nobdy cared. He was a comentator for many years and people liked him a lot.
In the US you have other examples of the same things. For instance I can think of Sofia Vergara and Charo to name the first that come to my mind. Both quite popular and I can spot their accent and some mistakes instantly and I'm not even a native speaker.
Also I mess gender a lot myself when I speak English and people don't seem to care.
It is one thing if you mix up gender occasionally. It is entirely different if you just don't care and get it wrong often. And entirely different if you do it as part of shtick intentionally mixing it in specific way.
Accent and ignoring genders or suffixes are different things. You really can't equate them.
But it is one of things you do end up memorizing the same way you memorize the word itself or its conjugations. It just does not make sense to go "I don't care about this stuff and won't learn it" and then demand language app will accommodate your refusal to learn gender.