Well, first of all, it at least has “Watashi” and “Boku”, and a few other gender markings I believe. Second of all, people tell me the Romance languages are harder to learn because of gendered nouns/adjectives. I’m learning Spanish currently and to me it makes zero difference in difficulty. “O” at the end means masculine, “A” at the end means feminine. Having like five different forms of “The“ is a bit weird to me, but that’s about it. I hear Russian has some harder gender rules, but I know almost nothing about Russian.
13 comments
That is not gender. That is masculine/feminine speech. Not gender like the linguistics term.
Listen son.
Native Spanish speaker btw. U cant friggin compare nouns and forms and mannerisms of speech with GRAMMATICAL GENDER where water out of all things is masculine because why not and so are the adjectives.
Still Spanish ain’t hard just get over it
You’d have to actually study a language with gender to have a real appreciation for the concept. Languages like Russian and German have three genders, which are further modified by 4-12 *cases* that require specific declension at all times. It makes learning the languages a fair bit more difficult, since English doesn’t have “genders” in the same sense, beyond basic he/him she/her it/it. Japanese doesn’t have any of that.
Different words to express a personality tied to gender are not the same as a language with gender.
[removed]
It’s no different from English in that respect, which you seem to speak just fine.
English has he/she/they. It doesn’t have the concept of non-naturally gendered nouns. What I mean by that is that gender is not assigned to objects which don’t have a natural gender. No one says “*you idiot, ‘notebook’ is masculine, what you meant was ‘notebooko’*”. There are some naturally gendered nouns like ‘actress’ – a female actor.
Anyway, Japanese is not easy. Not for native speakers of most European languages, anyway.
Romanian and German native speaker here (and Japanese learner)
Both of these languages have genders and tend to make them really complex, especially the endings in different cases.
Japanese doesn’t have the difficult of having to add an -ea,-,-eo,… etc. at the end of a word which makes it easier in those aspects, the language itself isn’t easier to learn though.
What you were talking about (私、僕) aren’t the genders.
Until you have memorized declension tables, you cannot know this kind of pain.
Anyway, every language is challenging to learn. You’re doing great.
You can use whatever personal referent you want (watashi, boku etc.) and it’s not grammatically incorrect, it just might get you weird looks if you’re a big beefy dude and you say あたし lol
I think there’s some confusion here, as a learner I can spot a few different things we are discussing here. There are tenses than men and women use and I honestly don’t understand that but I hear it’s super old school and traditional and still relevant some places (changing the words you use based on the gender you are/the gender of the speaker). When it comes to referring to others as well, there is gender. Like pronouns we would use in English, there is He (KARE / かれ/ 彼) and She (KANAJO / かなじょ/ 仮名). So I think this idea might be about another language? Like, in Chinese/Mandarin, I have heard it is the same pronoun for all genders of people when referring to them in the same way (more like they). I could be incorrect but I think this is close?
When people talk about a language having gender, they aren’t talking about languages having different forms of soaking depending on the gender of the speaker. They’re talking about nouns being assigned a gender linguistically. For example book being feminine, the moon being masculine, or eggs being neutral gender.
Japanese does not have gendered nouns like Spanish, German, Russian, etc.
Learning languages with gendered nouns can be difficult because 1) there’s usually no rhyme or reason regarding which nouns are considered feminine, masculine, or neuter, so the learner is required to just memorize the gender of each noun. And 2) generally these languages also have different grammatical rules for the rest of the sentence depending on the gender of the nouns.
So only having to deal with one level of verb conjugation, and not having to memorize genders can make Japanese easier in that way.
lmao dude
I took German in high school and the gendered nouns and the way they conjugate stuff was hard for me.
Japanese is still difficult for a bunch of other reasons, but I’d rather conjugate the verb than memorize “der, die, das, den, etc.”