Hacker News Reader

> 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...

View on HN

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! :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com