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
For example, if I am talking about a window and a door, and a window is masculine and a door is feminine, I can use the pronoun "it" in either masculine or feminine form to clearly refer to one or the other. Or I could use a verb "opened" in a masculine or feminine form, and it will be clear which of two things I mean without explicitly repeating.
Ah not all gendered languages have gendered verbs but for the ones that do it makes sense.
In armenian we dont even have he/she and its fine. In some cases Im sure its not as elequant. For a natural speaker it doesnt matter, and for the vast majority of history you more or less had only natural speakers, but if were talking about learning languages, it is needlessly complicated for little to no benefit
Well, in German you don't have gendered verbs, but windows are neutral and doors are female. So you can use the German equivalent of 'it' to refer to the window and 'she' to refer to the door, if you just mentioned them. Especially for long nouns, that's a lot faster than repeating them.
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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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Genders, or word classes in general, often work like registers in a computer. So you can quickly refer to things mentioned earlier.
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In armenian we dont even have he/she and its fine. In some cases Im sure its not as elequant. For a natural speaker it doesnt matter, and for the vast majority of history you more or less had only natural speakers, but if were talking about learning languages, it is needlessly complicated for little to no benefit
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