> A little background on me: I’ve been speaking French and Spanish my entire professional life
...
> The Bad
> I’m accustomed to gendered pronouns in both French and Spanish, so it was nice to see that in English. However, the lack of gendered nouns is awful. French and Spanish both have what I would call “sane” gendered nouns (shown in this dictionary), where you know of everyone's gender based on the adjective you hear.
> On the other hand, English has a weird grammatical system where you need to listen to the pronoun to know someone or something's gender. I want to know if someone is a man, a woman, or a chair based on the adjective, not just the pronoun.
A fun parallel. Consider the importance being placed on gender to be in part a malleable cultural factor in part perpetuated by language. Plenty on this in the sphere of ‘gender studies’.
I hate that idea, it's effectively overloading a noun that objectively speaking should only contain information that is intrinsic to the properties of the noun itself. A chair or other inanimate objects do not have genders, and forcing a non-native speaker to conjugate a noun correctly just adds to the mental complexity.
Side note: this is why I love grammatically simple languages such as Chinese.
> A little background on me: I’ve been speaking French and Spanish my entire professional life
...
> The Bad
> I’m accustomed to gendered pronouns in both French and Spanish, so it was nice to see that in English. However, the lack of gendered nouns is awful. French and Spanish both have what I would call “sane” gendered nouns (shown in this dictionary), where you know of everyone's gender based on the adjective you hear.
> On the other hand, English has a weird grammatical system where you need to listen to the pronoun to know someone or something's gender. I want to know if someone is a man, a woman, or a chair based on the adjective, not just the pronoun.