fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2866 ]

[ SECRET POST #2866 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2866 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

__________________________________________________

02.

__________________________________________________

03.

__________________________________________________

04.

__________________________________________________

05.

__________________________________________________

06.

[Person of Interest]

__________________________________________________

07. http://i.imgur.com/fq1S7if.png
[Strictly Come Dancing, linked for nudity]

__________________________________________________

08. [ SPOILERS for Bleak Expectations]

__________________________________________________

09. [ SPOILERS for Watchmen ]

__________________________________________________

10. [ SPOILERS for Transformers: More than Meets the Eye ]

__________________________________________________

11. [ WARNING for child sexual abuse ]

__________________________________________________

12. [ WARNING for rape, gore, etc]

[American Horror Story: Freakshow]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #409.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - ships it ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm currently studying Latin and French, and just starting German as well. I previously studied Japanese, which, though completely unlike English, was similar in one regard: no genders.

I just, I just can't wrap my mind around gendered nouns. Why is this random item female, this random thing male, and so on. If cat is male but my cat is a girl, what do I do. What if the agricola is a woman. Arghhh.

I think I could understand it better if they were simply categorized as "Group 1" and "Group 2" rather than "Masculine" and "Feminine", because then I wouldn't overthink it. Yet the concept is just the worst to me, my brain resists it.

For anyone else who studies languages, do you have any rants?

Ships and, until recently, hurricanes, are/were female in English. Maybe think of it kind of like that?

ayrt

Wasn't that just more... slang, though? To personify the those things, not simply refer to something inanimate with actual gendered pronouns?

"She" was used in referring to them - it's not exactly the same thing, of course, but I thought it might be kind of a useful mnemonic. If not, never mind. :)

Re: Language learning rants

(Anonymous) - 2014-11-08 01:03 (UTC) - Expand

until recently, hurricanes

Not THAT recently, there have been female AND male names for hurricanes my whole life that I can remember.

But hurricanes used to only have female names, which was the original anon's point.

Regarding your cat question: Because animals have a biological sex there are usually two words to describe them, one for males of the species and one for females. The female cat is die Katze in German, the male cat is der Kater. So if you want to talk about your male cat in German, you can use Kater and male pronouns. The same usually applies to nouns like job titles where the person could be a woman or a man.

Thanks, that's probably the case in French, too. I think it was in high school Spanish. It's just, from what I can see, there's still a "default" that's masculine... but then, I guess we're likely to do similar in English.

Still feels like I have to rewire my brain a bit to get these Romance languages down. :-/

Re: Language learning rants

(Anonymous) - 2014-11-08 01:04 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Language learning rants

th0rns_n_r0ses - 2014-11-08 01:41 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Language learning rants

(Anonymous) - 2014-11-08 02:40 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Language learning rants

(Anonymous) - 2014-11-08 02:54 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Language learning rants

(Anonymous) - 2014-11-08 03:08 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Language learning rants

th0rns_n_r0ses - 2014-11-08 21:01 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Language learning rants

raspberryrain - 2014-11-08 02:51 (UTC) - Expand

Just chiming in with another example. A Russian cat is a "koshka", which makes many people assume that a cat is female until proven otherwise. A tomcat is actually a "kot".

I have a similar rant. Why does German have so many damn articles???? English only has three. The, A and AN. That's it. German has a bus load of them. I am having such a hard time remembering what article goes with what noun in German. There's no short cut. You just have to memorize them.

Why is Danish so much like English but so fucking different where it counts? And how the hell do prepositions work? It makes absolutely no sense. Why is it "jeg går på café" but "jeg går i biografen"? French was way less frustrating.

where it counts?

Was that intentional? (Sorry, I can just never grasp the logic behind their counting system)

Re: Language learning rants

(Anonymous) - 2014-11-08 01:01 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Language learning rants

(Anonymous) - 2014-11-08 01:04 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Language learning rants

(Anonymous) - 2014-11-08 04:39 (UTC) - Expand

I'm shooting for the JLPT2 this December in Japanese and I'm probablyyy gonna fail it. Vocab is just like.....so many. And I get using anki for kanji and stuff, but I feel like some people learn the entire Japanese language via flashcards and I totally can't do it. And newspaper articles can get pretty boring, ngl. sighhhh.

I hate German numbers, they're a pain in the ass. Every time I hear a German number I have to tell my brain 'stop, the first number is actually the second one'. Vierundzwanwig a shit, it should be Zwanzigundvier. It's the logical order, the one that makes sense.

I agree wholeheartedly. Hell, German is my mother tongue and I still have to do the switching in my head thing you describe. Only French is worse when it comes to numbers, quatre-vingt-dix-neuf anyone?

Re: Language learning rants

ariakas - 2014-11-08 01:33 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Language learning rants

chrys - 2014-11-08 01:37 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Language learning rants

(Anonymous) - 2014-11-08 12:46 (UTC) - Expand

As a German native speaker I would understand zwanzigundvier as two numbers: 20 and 4, instead of 24... Without the und it would make sense, though, but to German speakers it would still sound strange. ^^;

How are you dealing with numbers from 100 up, though? E.g. 47852 would be siebenundvierzigtausendachthundertzweiundfünfzig, which lists the numbers like this: 7 40 1000 8 100 2 50.

I've always been a little "buh?" about the genders in many other European languages myself and I have a sneaking suspicion they helped contribute to English's dominance as a global language over those other choices because my friends and acquaintances of other language backgrounds that similarly don't have them are equally "buh?" and glad English doesn't. English, of course, has many downsides, but giving pencils "genders" ain't one of them.

Duolingo, I loathe and love you. It's a really good site/app until you go to the comment section.

I really do understand that not everyone has the experience in studying languages that I do. I understand that most people are beginners, and that's fine. I'm totally willing to help people out! Most people are absolutely fine.

But some people are so rude about it, and the comments sections are, well, not the best layout, so you see the same questions repeated over, and over, and over, and over. It would be really nice if there were a "beginner's faq/forum" kind of section, but there isn't. And then there are the people who are trying to help, but they say something incorrect, and then it blows up and a bunch of people start the "This person said X, so it could only ever be X," but it's actually Y. Why can't people double check? Or someone will argue that the moderator, a native speaker of the language(!), is wrong about their own language.

It really is a great program, though.

I didn't even know there was a comments section. XD I just do the lessons.

*hugs* My mother language is gendered like that and I can't quite imagine how hard it is to grasp this if yours isn't. Even learning gendered nouns in other languages isn't comparable, because I understand the concept so I just need to remember the genders.

Answering your question, in those cases you'd use the female version. If you were talking about cats in general, you'd use the male version. That's how it usually works.

French pronouns, man. Different pronouns depending on the gender of the object, position in the sentence. Stressed pronouns. Direct object pronouns. Indirect object pronouns. Demonstrative pronouns.

I have to say, I've learned more about English parts of speech since taking up French again than I did in four years of high school.

What's with the lack of vowel indications, Arabic? Yeah, I know I'll get the hang of it eventually, but still... :[

Also, I am intrigued of how oddly specific you are (i'm thinking of words that mean your father's cousin, your mother's brother). It's useful. However, your forty words [exaggerating] for brother or sister is killing me.

Sincerely,

I withdrew from Arabic 1. I will see you again though...

In French, and German, and Czech, it works like this: The word, not the thing it describes, has a "gender." Thinking of it as "Group 1" and "Group 2" is a good idea!

This means that third-person pronouns lack the "sex" meaning their apparent equivalents would have in English. And a pronoun's gender depends on its antecedent, so you actually can't quite use pronouns the same way as in English.

A given thing, animal, or person, may have a sex, but is in itself genderless. And it may have a masculine, a feminine, and a neuter (well, not in French) word that could all be used to describe it.

And now you know why some language students make a big deal about not calling sex "gender"!

I'm an ESL, and I really, really, really hate phrasal verbs.

It's like, English have these basic verbs, for example, move. But then you add another word and suddenly it means something completely different: move in, move away, move into, move off, move over... There are practically hundreds, if not thousands of combinations! Even if I know the meaning of each word separately it doesn't help much, because once combined they can mean something entirely different to the original meaning.

So far, I've managed to learn a few dozens, but for the most part I have to check the dictionary every time I find one, because for the love of god I can't flipping understand what are they trying to tell me. They drive me crazy.

(I've been learning English for 25 years and I simply can't seem to master this!)

My only rant is: I hate how hard it's gotten. I used to learn language just in passing and now I struggle. Also how much you forget if you don't use it :( My Latin was quit good but now so much of it is lost.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only