As a native speaker of a language without articles, I find the English article system by far the most intuitive and easiest to learn of all the languages I have studied. Most other Indo-European languages have articles that you simply need to memorize, as there is no way to derive them from the word itself. Which I never manage to do.
Genders in language is seemingly such a needlessly pointless concept I am really confused as to how it ever developed.
I still feel Armenian is such a great Indo European language. No articles, no genders, completely phonetic, consistent verb endings, no particular word ordering
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.
> 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: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/russian/comments/h08q29/the_insistence_on_%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%84%D0%B5_having_masculine_gender/" rel="nofollow">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).
>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. My intention was not to cause affront, just to underscore the idea that native speakers have it easier and may not be able to experience or understand the difficulties of a non-native speaker.
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
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I still feel Armenian is such a great Indo European language. No articles, no genders, completely phonetic, consistent verb endings, no particular word ordering
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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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For most words, yes. Some loanwords are tricky to gender because of their declension. For example gender of "coffee" in russian is highly disputed: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/russian/comments/h08q29/the_insistence_on_%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%84%D0%B5_having_masculine_gender/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/russian/comments/h08q29/the_insiste...
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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.
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Said every native speaker I suppose.
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>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.
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