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Comment by my-huge-pony | Hacker News Reader

As a native speaker of a language with genders, it's not complex if you're a native speaker (basically nobody ever makes grammar errors related to gender when speaking/writing). As for their role, I think they may work as a simple error correction code (if genders in the sentence don't match, you misheard something)

FWIW I struggle with using English articles and past/present/future perfect time, because those concepts are absent from my language. Despite decades of experience with English at this point.

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> nobody ever makes grammar errors related to gender

For most words, yes. Some loanwords are tricky to gender because of their declension. For example gender of "coffee" in russian is highly disputed: https://www.reddit.com/r/russian/comments/h08q29/the_insiste...

In (European) Portuguese some people (I've seen this more in older people) use feminine for hamburgers (like in Spanish, afaik), but most people use masculine. I guess it would make sense to be feminine because it's a sandwich, and sandwich is feminine.

In Russian it's quite common too. Car can be feminine (машина), masculine (авто/автомобиль), and neuter (транспортное средство).

And different car brands usually have their own gender too: for example Mercedes is usually masculine even though named after founder's daughter, and Honda is isually feminine.

The brand gender is really interesting. We will usually use the gender of the type of vehicle. So for saying "My Honda" we will use masculine if it's a car (O meu [carro] Honda), but feminine if it's a van (A minha [carrinha] Honda).

As a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, today I learnt that "sanduíche" is feminine in Portugal. I had no idea!

And I learned that it's masculine in Brazil! :)

> As a native speaker of a language with genders, it's not complex

Said every native speaker I suppose.

Why abridge (and misrepresent) my quote?

>it's not complex if you're a native speaker

Of course this is very complex and not intuitive if you're a language learner. My point was that while there are parts of grammar that native speakers struggle with, and kids drill them for good grades in school, this is not one of that parts. And my broader point was that "needlessly pointless part of the language" is subjective and something language users should judge.

Oh it seems you took it personally, whereas I mentioned "every native speaker". My intention was not to rule you, just to underscore the point that native speakers have it easier and may not be able to experience or understand the difficulties of a non-native speaker.

I didn't read it as something being taken personally, just as a clarification. A misquote is a misquote no matter whose it was

> My intention was [...] just to underscore the point that native speakers have it easier and may not be able to experience or understand the difficulties of a non-native speaker.

Fwiw, that was not at all clear to me from a sarcastic few words

No sarcasm intended, I was being literal. Me and my wife have different mother tongues. What's natural to her isn't to me and vice versa and we keep telling each other that it's easy.

Huh, I'm in the same situation but not sure I've ever considered an aspect of my language easy just because I speak it, and my partner's country is known for saying "deutsche sprache, schwere sprache" (german language, difficult language) so the entire country seems to realise it. I'll poke fun at "we only have like half the genders you do" but it's always clearly in jest; from learning a language as an adult myself the difficulty is very clear. Interesting to hear the different perspective

s/rule/rile/g

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