WHY

Foreign language classes in high school creates gender abolitionists
- It certainly fuels the flames.
  Once you start asking why the hell the french have to gender everything, you start asking why we have to gender anything.
- It's all a construct!

A machine in french is feminine. It come from latin machina (μαχανά in Greek) which is feminine (-ina suffix is feminine). Washing is just a verb so it have no influence on the "gender".
A washing machine -> Une machine à laver
- Close but wrong. It's because washing is feminine.
  
  All those years of school and lecturing from my teachers only to discover it was all lies.... thank anyway I guess.
  
  Sadly true, Its like an on pourpouse languaje setting
  
  That nice dirty ass

French is wild, but it’s actually pretty easy to remember genders for appliances in particular. Generally, the more attractive the appliance, the less questionable its gender. Who could misgender a swamp cooler or a blender?
- Generally, the more attractive the appliance, the less questionable its gender.
  Lol what
  
  You trying to tell me that you don’t know your toaster’s safe word?
  
  There is a say in france along the lines that the more bad something is the higher the probability it's feminin.

Just switch to German, I know it's die Geschirrspülmaschine
- Das ist die Waschmaschine! Setzen, sechs!
  
  Die, Bart, die! Herrgott nochmal!
- Not knowing any German I can't tell the difference between this being correct or your putting down "the water sloshing noise machine" with a German accent.
  
  They're the same picture
- Germans: German is such a beautiful language!
  German:
  
  It's beautiful in its precision and how it constantly clears your throat
- Ok then. What's the gender of Nutella?
  
  That wasn't covered in German class
  
  Clearly it's dieras Nutella
- At least in my part of Austria it's usually „der Geschirrspüler“
  
  Well yeah that's a different word
- That's a dishwasher
  
  It's a machine that washes, close enough

Un baguette, une baguette, le la.
Il y a un truc qui peut vous servir dans cette situation là.
Dites juste deux baguettes.
C'est un peu plus cher mais en tout cas, il vaut la peine et vous aurez deux baguettes à la fin.
- A baguette, a baguette, the a.
  There is a trick that can help you in this situation.
  Just say two baguettes.
  It is a little more expensive but in any case, it is worth it and you will have two baguettes at the end.
  I don't think the translator worked that well here, but I think it makes it funner lmao
  
  Hey that`s my actual french!

What do you thin? It's conceptually a hole that gets wet!
- What about a dryer?
  
  It's conceptually Ben Shapiro's wife.
- Ur mom!

It can be both ! You can either call it "un lave-linge" or "une machine à laver".
- Yeah, it would be nice if people stopped assuming it gender.

- SEND THAT CUNT BACK TO HELL FROM WHENCE IT CAME
  Telefrancais haunted my nightmares so badly as a child

In Hebrew, the word for "stone" is male-sounding while grammatically female, and the word for "rock" is female-sounding while grammatically male, you know, for simplicity.

in my Spanish (HS) class if I don't know I just guess based off of the vibes
I've guessed correctly more often than not
- I don’t know how German compares to French or Spanish, but in German things can be masculine, feminine, or neutral. What I do—which is partially as a protest, and partially out of laziness—is to assume every non-person noun is neutral.
  It works surprisingly well in IT where basically all nouns are neutral, but I probably sound like Kevin from The Office in every other context.
  
  Yeah as an English speaker using neuter seems very natural. Modern English loan words such as from IT are often neuter for that reason.
  However in general, words are statistically most likely to be masculine and least likely to be neuter. So if the word ending isn't obviously feminine and it's not a category such as IT that has a common gender you may be better off guessing masculine.

ITT: Canadians butchering the French language.

C'mon, une machine a laver is obviously a girl! Unless you call it a lave-linge instead, in which case it's a boy.
- La laveuse

This is my biggest struggle with German. 3 genders and then plurals, cases etc that can change it again.

Teacher: Time for the French, get your berets!
- “Mark, please pass out the baguettes to the class. Only take one!”
  
  I'm le tired
- Achctually in french they write ah ah ah.
  Very disturbing.

Doesn’t it depend on if it’s a top load or bottom load model?
- I think power bottom loaders are a thing now
- These days with everything being LGBTQIAOMGWTFBBQ++++++++, no, not even remotely.
  
  My washing machine is only A+++

Je suis enchanté
Où est le bibliothèque?
Voilà mon passport
Ah, Gérard Depardieu
Baguette, hon hon hon
Baguette, hon hon hon (hon hon) hon hon hon!
- I'm a simple man, I see Flight of the Conchords, I upvote.
- I don't know a single lick of French but somehow my brain knew this is the intro to Foux Da Fafa, a song I haven't listened to in over a decade

My native language is gendered but I still don't always know how I'm supposed to talk about male members of a species with a feminine name or vice versa.
"A person by the name of Mary was..." "Person" is masculine. Mary can hear me and I don't want to offend her. "Was" has a masculine and a feminine form.
I think the masculine form of "was" would be technically correct, but then do I have to use masculine pronouns? "A person by the name of Mary was there and he..." The real answer is to rephrase what I said to avoid awkward grammar.
- i thought gendered languages had two genders for words like "person" so you could make the swap when the gender is known
  e.g. un person / une personne
  
  I deliberately picked an example where there isn't (or I don't know) a feminine version. Most words that I can think of for various categories of people do have two genders, although in many cases the feminine version sounds awkward to me, a little like the "trix" suffix does to English speakers.
  (Also, the male default sometimes makes using the feminine version of a word sound like you're deliberately emphasizing that you're referring specifically to women as opposed to simply talking about someone who happens to be a woman.)

The word for potato is my favorite. It’s so fancy and English just calls it a potato.
- My highschool french class always loved the word for "squirrel", "pomegranate", and of course the ever popular "seal in the shower" combo for extra fun.
- to be fair, that's a modern take. in antiquity it was so ignoble it was given the generic name for a fruit/vegetable.
  a modern version might be more akin to "dirt thing"
  
  Potatoes weren't introduced to europeans in the antiquity

That's common in most Latin derived languages

Washing Machines are girls for some reason... same as dryers
- In France, "lave-linge" and "machine à laver" are equally common. The first is masculine and the second feminine. For dryers, "sèche-linge" is definitely most common, and is masculine. Of course this might be very different in Quebec or other french-speaking regions.
- Just to confirm for people who don't know it's not the actual physical object that has a gender but the word
- Isn't machine female? La machine
  
  "La machine à laver," or "la laveuse"
  But not all machines are X machine, some have specific names that could be either gender.

Fake. If that was me, those baguettes would be gone within 0.3 nanoseconds.

Maybe it's a trans washing machine, you shouldn't assume its gender. /j

And if you get it wrong you'll be forever banned from blahaj.
- Can we not bring these stupid, lazy jokes into Lemmy please?
- mistakes = ok
  purposefully using the wrong pronoun = not ok
  is it that difficult? I don't understand why you're so upset about a gender diverse instance enforcing their rules 🤷‍♀️

Girl, easy.
- Jason! Just because I let you climb through my window at midnight doesn't make me easy. I mean, don't you put in some effort climbing up here? 😔

This is sponsored by Big Gender to sell us more gender. /j

Reminds me of the time when I forgot if the Latin word for bedroom is -a or -um... (it was cubiculum btw, apparently all rooms are gender neutral)

La Casa vs El hospital. What determines the gender of each? Spelling is great, but this piece boggles the mind.
- In Spanish, most masculine words are "LONERS", and end with one of those letters.
- Suffix -a mostly female, Suffix -al mostly male. There are exceptions but it's a good rule of thumb.
  
  And then you get - el agua
  Feminine. With feminine adjectives. El agua clara. But you have to use "El".
  Spanish is still way more consistent than English tho
- I’m sure there’s etymological reasons, but in practice ‘la hospital’ being less pleasant to say (with two vowel sounds directly next to each other) probably contributed. Like how it’s el agua, even though any adjectives for it are feminine: el agua contaminada.

Je ne suis pas Francais

Me who don't want to assume someone's gender: starts speaking Chinese (because "他" is a gender neutral pronoun)
More reasons why Latin based language sucks. We should make Chinese the lingua franca of the world... 😉
- The Chinese decided to introduce gendered pronouns to make their language more European so... Uh... 他她它 moment.
- German also has a gender neutral pronoun (es) 👍

Protip : french is misogynist

If you're not sure just guess femminine, that seema to be the case more often than not