As Someone Learning German, I Know This Pain

Trick question, washing machines come in many different genders:
- I thought pans came in many different genders
  
  Bi only in two.
- Only the first two are genders. The others are psychological illnesses
  Edit: /s
  
  found the transphobe

Die Waschmaschine die
- Die Bart die
  
  No one who speaks German could be an evil man.
- Das ist die Kleidung der Waschmaschine
  Ich stehe auf der Waschmaschine
  German grammar cannot be trusted
- Waschmaschine:*

If you get the wrong one just accuse the examiner of being transphobic.
- please no baiting trans folk
- What a transphobic thing to say.
  
  Man... This post going over lots of heads.
  
  Don't bite the bait pls, reporting in this case is best course of action. Thanks
  
  Sorry you're being downvoted, I think you're entirely correct. I hope the other people just don't realize how jokes that are relativising transphobic experiences like that are downplaying the actual issues trans people are facing.

This is my go to response when people are trying to claim that English is hard... Well at least I don't have to remember what gender has randomly been assigned to every noun I want to use.
- No, instead you have to learn to read and spell in a system that often sounds quite different to what is written. I want to read a book that's never been read. I want to live a life alive at a live show. Anything ending in ough which has something like 6 or 8 different sounds. I'm a native speaker trying to work with my wife on English (we speak Japanese at home). It's insane for any reading/spelling.
  
  Are you through laughing at the English kneading dough in a trough, though?
  
  Oh yeah, unlike French where 2/3 of each word is silent.
  
  And then you also have to get the correct stress on the syllables which are also unguessable. Ask for a banana instead of a banaaaaaaaana and people won't understand.
  
  That's the only hard thing about English. Many other languages have this difficulty plus many more (gender, tenses, complex rules, exceptions...).
  
  Plus every word has like 10 different meanings while other languages sometimes have 10 different words for the same thing.
- I rarely hear people saying English is hard, except for the pronunciation.
- German has this too.
  
  And then, when you're learning French, you have to watch out for words that have a different gender than in German.
  
  Yep, that's how I know. The struggle was real for 3 years.
- Your anglocentric view is common, but also completely wrong - speakers of strongly gendered languages (Latin, German, Portuguese, French, etc) don't have to remember a word's gender either, it just comes naturally as you become fluent.
  
  Nope. You just grow confident to not notice the blunders, and learn to recover fast enough to not persist when it would be detrimental.
  Native speakers making mistakes or not caring to stick to the rules is one of the forces behind languages’ evolution.
  
  I'm semi-fluent in German and Spanish, and my strategy is guesstimate. I figure that I've probably read/heard the word before, so I just test out the genders on it and whichever one "feels more natural" or "sounds less weird", it's probably because I've heard it that way before, so I go with that.
  
  Oh no it doesn't!
  In Swedish you can figure out the gender of a new word because the phrase hints at what it is. In french there is no such luxury, and even worse, it's a Bel (sounds like belle which is feminine) avion not a beau(masc.) avion even if avion is masculine...
  Lots of french people don't know the gender of the ocean and other voyel starting words because of that.

Have you tried asking the washing machine for its preferred pronouns?
- mate, can you please not bait trans folk? thanks

Easy. Since it's the womans' job to do laundry, the washing machine is also female ^/s

Me in my mandarin class not having to conjugate, add pronouns, use words like the and to, and not having words more than 4 syllables. But having to learn 10,000 + characters

Female in Russian, because the word machine/машина ends with A, and so any machine, from tattoo gun to steam engine is female gendered. I always thought French and German worked in somewhat similar manner?
- It works like that in French until you use a different word for the machine.
  "Mon ordinateur est une bonne machine". In a single sentence my computer was described with words both male and female.
  It's just vocabulary and grammar, not the deep essence or identity of things or people.
- it is in German too.
  It is die Waschmaschine. and a Steam Engine ist die Dampfmaschine. And it is a very straight foreard naming convention. Just add what kind of machine it is to the front of the noun.
- I didn't learn of any rhyme or reason to it in German when I took classes on it. In fact, in a few cases, the gender changes the meaning of the word. Der See und die See, for example. One means lake and the other means sea/ocean.
  
  There's more shenanigans with "umfahren" and "umfahren", where Intonation matters. One means "drive around", the other "run over".
  
  That's a rather rare occurence. Most often, only the grammar will be incorrect if you use the wrong article.
  
  OMG, I've been doing my Duolingo lessons and never realised that they had different meanings, I just thought Germans used one word for all bodies of water 😭
- i don't recall there being any rhyme or reason to gender in german, but it's been many years since i studied. i do remember that the gender of any word like ____-machine would be whatever the gender is for machine.
  
  Native German speaker here, can confirm yes, there are some patterns but mostly the genders are pretty random; but a Waschmaschine is feminine because a Maschine is feminine, yes
  
  There's some tendencies, but a ton of exceptions. I wouldn't call It strict rules.
  
  The only actual rule I'm aware of is diminutives (i.e. words ending in -chen or -lein) always being neuter (das). This is also the reason why it's das Mädchen (girl) and das Fräulein.
  The rest is arbitrary, and sometimes there's even regional variations.
- Spanish, Italian and Portuguese do, i believe... French has some rather... Unusual conventions i think, not matching the rest
  
  In French "machine" is feminine like in the other languages.
- The general rule of thumb in French is the word is feminine if it ends with "-le" like "la table", the table is feminine with it the article "la" to denote feminine. But this is not always the case. For example, house in French is "la maison" which doesn't end in "-le".
  
  As a french I never heard about this, and I can think of way more words contradicting it than confirming it. I wouldn't use it.

How aggregious is misgendering items in other languages? I assume it's no big deal and may not even be worth correcting most of the time?
- The example you used involved humans. They were asking about items.
  
  Wouldn't it just be Stripper/Stripperen and Stripperin/Stripperinnen?
  
  Yeah, German has that as does English. Host vs Hostess, Actor vs Actress, etc. There is a push to only use the male word (I've never seen it go the other way). What a lot of people don't know is that surnames also preserve things like this. Brewer was a male brewer but Brewster was a female one.
  
  You don't do this with non german words like striper. That's not how german works.
- It sounds very weird and you know immediately it's a foreigner speaking. When you are fluent the genders just come naturally, I don't think I've ever seen a native making a mistake like that, maybe children.
  I wouldn't correct anyone unless they want to learn though, the noun itself is more important and it carries the meaning across.
  This is for Brazilian Portuguese at least.
  
  I can vouch it's the same for Mexican Spanish.
- It's jarring but obviously completely acceptable from someone learning the language
  
  Yeah, it just sounds off and someone might correct you but it isn't a big deal.
- If you misgender something you either:
  Are a native speaker that messed up (but know the correct gender), so either you correct yourself or just continue, since everyone will understand that you messed up and will understand you perfectly.
  Are learning the language: if the other person is close to you, you'll be correct to help you learn the language. Else, the other person will notice that you're not a native speaker and will switch the gender in their head to not discourage you. Unless the other person is an asshole.
  There are very few situations where the hearer can't just correct the gender in their head, so it's not very serious. I'm talking about Spanish though, idk if in other languages is different.
- Every once in a while there are two words that are written the same but have different gender, if you use the wrong article it'll get confusing for a second and you'll have to figure out from context what was actually meant.
- In spoken language? As other said, you notice and ypu know you don't talk to native speaker. You might correct them just ao they can learn and carry on.
  On exam, which is the contextnof the meme? Pretty aggregious.
- French is just kind of compact (they even have the 'de' to un-ambigous things I figure) so sometimes the phrase rolls on but means something completely different, it might work out or not but can be confusing.
  My master mistake, at dinner with my SOs family;
  Tout le monde veut rentrer dans le moule.
  This is the correct version.
  Edit: BTW Swedish is the other way around and it's quite easy to understand even if you missgender.
  
  That must've generated some thunderous laughter :D
  
  That's the most frustrating part about Danish/English. Does saying the wrong article break communication? no, most people won't notice unless you really linger on it or point it out (you probably wouldn't hear it half the time in Danish anyways). Does it look fucking stupid and wrong when you write it? yes 🙃
- It would look or sound really stupid and be absolutely incorrect if you have done it in Polish. There is high chance you would be mocked for it.
- Informally, no native will ever correct you for misgendering a word - it sounds weird and stunted, but changes little in communicating the sorts of simple ideas I'd imagine a low-proficiency speaker would need to get through.
  In a more formal setting, 10/10 times someone will correct you.

In Spanish it even depends on which dialect you're speaking.
In some places it's "la lavadora" (she/her), and in other places it's "el lavarropas" (he/him).
- It's like butter in German, which in some regions is female.
  
  Dude, you have it the wrong way around.
  
  Where?
- Like another comment said, in this particular case it even depends which word you use for the machine (une machine a laver, un lave-linge).
  More in general, there's a similar thing between France French and Quebec french where they also invert a bunch of them (un job/une job).

This one is funny actually! You can say une machine à laver, or un lave linge. :D
- Never in my life did I hear the term lave linge
  
  Really? I've seen it at least twice in the last minute.

It’s probably makes sense once explained properly but as an outsider to gendered languages in general it feels like the stupidest archaic idea ever lol.
- Grammatical gender has nothing to do with sexual gender. It is simply the expression on how words are declined in different cases.
  
  I’m not arguing there is good reason and thoughtful context haha, I’m certain of that. Just makes learning a mess if you’ve not encountered it beforehand lol.
- As an insider to gendered language it feels like the stupidest idea ever to make non-gendered language gendered and call it inclusion or whatever they call it.
  
  I don't know what we're talking about anymore
- As a speaker of a couple of gendered languages, it absolutely is.
- reject natural language, return to toki pona
- You clearly use one gendered language, at least. Yes - English is a gendered language, you'll be surprised to learn. It just so happens that your language is such a clusterfuck it couldn't reconcile traditional Latin/German gendered structure, and abandoned most of it.
  
  English is a clusterfuck no doubt about it. I don’t know if losing the gendered portion over time was such a bad thing though. Might’ve made it more accessible in some ways and that helps a language survive I think. But I’m not a linguist and there’s a million other factors too.

End-syllables help a long way:
For example the often cited neutral: girl/Mädchen is a diminutive. So everything with -chen or -lein becomes neutral and therefore: das.
(Brötchen, Männlein, Häuschen, Fräulein)
https://mein-deutschbuch.de/genusbestimmung.html#nachsilben
As a bonus: in plural everything is "die" so just formulate everything in plural and you are always right.
- The problem though is when you get into figuring out if it is in the nominative, accusative, dative, or genitive case.
  Der Hund can easily be turned into den Hund, dem Hund, or des Hundes if you aren't careful.
  And for the love of God, don't ask me anything about subjunctive case 😮‍💨

Une machine, putain !
Noticed that space after putain ? When the sign has two things, like an exclamation mark or a colon, you put the space in between. Otherwise not !
Sorry for the the frenchification by using the "espace insécable" in the English text.
- Does '÷' require 3 spaces?
- Except for ; because it's no fun if there's not at least one exception.
  
  Semicolon is excepted because it's effectively a comma, I'd assume.
  
  Are you sure about that? Seems all signs with a dot plus another thingy are concerned:
  https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espace_ins%C3%A9cable

Doesn't French have 'la' and 'le' as well?
- Yes, that's the point. You need to memorize which words go with la and which with le. Or der/die/das for German. Or no articles for Slavic languages but the declination and other words in the sentence (selection of pronouns, forms of adjectives and sometimes verbs) depend on the gender.
  
  It's machina lavatoria in latin and obviously femal for your grammar.
  
  Thanks, it flew miles over my head.
  
  If I remember correctly from my German class in highschool, the rule of thumb was if it's an inanimate object use the feminine Die. That was in the mid 90s and I haven't spoken German since, so that with a grain of salt.

How do gendered languages handle neologisms?
(this is a very difficult question to search btw)
- At least for romance languages, there is a rhyme and reason for the gender each noun gets, so neologisms and borrowed words tend to follow the same logic.
  For word morphology, as an example, in Portuguese nouns ending in a are almost always female, so new words that end with a are very likely to be female.
  There are semantic rules too, for example brands and companies are typically (I want to say always but there's probably edge cases) female, so even though Netflix and Amazon didn't exist before they're still female.
  
  That's... Curious. In Spanish both Netflix and Amazon are male.
  
  there is a rhyme and reason for the gender each noun gets
  There is? I only took high school level French, so I'm very ignorant on the topic and happy to admit so, but any time I asked that about that very idea all I ever got in response was "that's just how it is!", so I would love to learn if you're willing to elaborate.
  And I don't think "it ends in A" is solid enough foundation to call it "rhyme and reason"
- In slav languages, you just go with how the neologism sounds. "Computer" ends in hard r, so it's masculine, for example.
  Every once in a while there's going to be shit like with "coffee" though. It sounds neutral-gendered and is officially neutral-gendered, but there's been a big period when people believed it should be masculine because of the source language or some shit. Still a lot of people arguing about it.
- Native German speaker here but I also speak Spanish, Portuguese, French and Swedish. Each of these languages handles them differently so I am thinking there’s not a general answer here.
  It also can depend within each language on some context. For example in German many neologisms are automatically neuter (das) unless they happen to resemble some common pattern. For example a lot of German words that end with an -e are feminine and sometimes that is applied to neologisms too.
- Sometimes it changes. For example, Covid in French, everyone was using "le covid" (i guess cos it's a virus, and virus is a masculin word), but then I believe the French academy weighed in that it should be "la covid" because it's not the virus but the disease (la maladie) we're talking about. Anyway. Yeah other than the official sources, many of us peasants all still say Le covid because by the time they weighed in we were all saying Le and so now saying La sounds weird.

They should be non binary, like in the US.

Same as the dish washer.
- Depends on which word you use. At least in German.
- No, it's masculine in German and French.
  
  Die Spühlmaachiene

Washing machines have genders?
- Yes, female in german, idc about french but i suspect it's the same.
  Is it stupid we've done this for all nouns? Yes.
  Do I judge you subconsciously if you use it wrong? Also unfortunately yes.
  
  In French, we have different synonyms for that :
  "machine à laver", which is female
  "lave-linge", which is male
  "laveuse" (Québec only), which is female
  Why do they have different gender for the same thing ? Because, insert your favorite expletive word, that's why !
  
  Machines tend to be female, because the word machine itself is feminine
- Where do you think new washing machines come from? The sturgeon brings them? Don't be ridiculous! They are far too heavy!
  
  I thought they came from pet hair clumping up in another washing machine.
- Also in German, there's a neutral gender which applies to diminutive nouns ending in -chen, which means that men are male (Der Mann), women are female (Die Frau), boys are male (Der Junge) and girls are neutral (Das Mädchen). Which is fun to learn for the first time lol.
- Yes, but only in Europe.
  
  Latín América, too.
  (Autocorrect put tildes in those words and I do not regret it)