Does Japanese have grammatical gender? (Like in European languages)

16 comments

1. No for the most part it is a neutral language unlike French, it was a relief.

2. Thankfully, no

3. Thank goodness, no gendered nouns. I’m Latina but not too good with Spanish, it was always a pain learning abt pronouns and conjunctions, but at least I don’t have to deal with ‘La’ or ‘El’ anymore :_)

4. Short answer is no. There are relatively few gendered nouns and no gendered grammar. Some may point out that there are words for “he” and “she” (gendered third person pronouns), but they are not used very frequently. There is some difference in the way that men and women tend to speak, although there aren’t really rules around this, and if a speaker does not adopt an especially feminine or masculine style of speaking you cannot easily tell their gender based on speech patterns.

5. No.

6. Gender is only recognized in Japanese with pronouns, for 1st, 2nd and 3rd person (maaaybe 2nd person, I just put that there for completeness, but can’t think of examples right now), and for some professions. Nurse, for example, is traditionally 看護婦 *kangofu,* (with 婦 *fu* meaning woman), but is now preferred as the non-gender specific 看護師 *kangoshi* (師 *shi* meaning expert).

   Otherwise, verb forms, determiners, etc, are all ungenderised.

7. No, Japanese doesn’t have gender. It doesn’t have articles it needs to be compatible with. They have *honorifics*, which you put at the end of someone’s (usually last) name, but they they’re more about conveying status than gender. Closest I’ve seen to that are the casual honorifics kun (くん) and chan (ちゃん), with the former more used for boys and the latter for girls; but more importantly, they’re for people you’re close to and don’t hold status above you.

   On a related note, you should look into measure words. To be succint, they go at the end of a number, and the usage depends on what kind of thing you’re counting. They’re not fun, but they’re important to study.

   EDIT: me and my fat fingers!

8. No grammatical gender. There are of course gendered pronouns, but these aren’t the same as grammatical gender (other comments seem to be conflating the two somewhat) and even then, these pronouns aren’t used anywhere near as frequently as they are in other languages.

9. nah not really

10. No 🙂

    But there are other things that make it hard to remember everything:
    Counters, Giving and Taking, Kanji…

11. Japanese lacks grammatical gender entirely, as well as plural forms and articles.

12. You don’t even have plural forms. When you say e.g. kami, you may mean god or gods, or goddess.

13. there is no grammatical gender, but there can be a stark difference in the way men and women speak japanese. but nothing in the sense of how spanish/french/german work. there’s not even really plurals in japanese!

14. No grammatical gender but some words are gendered. Similar to English. Prince and Princess, King and Queen. God and Goddess. Probably a few more I can’t think of at the moment

15. I swear I thought this was r/linguisticshumor

16. There is no gender for Japanese nouns. However, men and women speak differently, often using different sentence endings and men have more pronouns to describe themselves (僕、俺、わし、私). But no gendered nouns. Japanese grammar is actually simpler than many European languages grammatically in many ways.