Language Learners, or: The Owl Comes For Us All

there's a few fixed rules for the nouns if that helps

but also there's an impassioned argument about the correct gender of Nutella so like. good luck.

 

if the noun ends in -e it's probably feminine but for everything else Good Fucking Luck

 

nouns ending with -ung, -keit and -heit are always feminine, too.

 

thank you to everyone but also What
what are the stakes of this argument please & thank you

also I wasn't super clear earlier but like, is there. way to navigate nonbinaryness in gender? do y'all opt for neuter?

 

this makes me wish i was learning german so i could become the foremost researcher in arguments about the gender of nutella in german

 

ok basically the argument is whether Nutella is 'die Nutella', 'das Nutella' or 'der Nutella' with my opinion being that 'der' is right the fuck out, and 'die' and 'das' both being acceptable but 'das' is clearly better, soundwise. Since Nutella is a kinda nonsense word vaguely sourced from italian, there's not exactly a lot of external guideline.

as to nonbinaryness....that's not really a thing in German. Using 'es' as a pronoun for a person is rude as absolute fuck (it's like using 'it'). I usually do a bit of a dance and try to avoid pronouns, or if not possible go for the one that's hopefully least offensive because there is... no singular 'they' stand-in that I know off.

 

I had a German friend once get really mad at "der Butter".

 

like, german makes no vocab distinction between sex and gender, so a lot of the time when discussing things like that, you gotta make do with english loan words.

 

This was also my exact reaction.


On a totally unrelated note, I was browsing example sentences the other day, and...



Tatoeba, no.

(My favorite part is that the translation is infinitely easier to understand without explanation than the original even for me, and my Japanese ability could generously be called "beginner-intermediate".)

 

tatoeba, yes.

 

thanks @TheOwlet ! I had a feeling it was like that, I feel like English's main benefit is that it has space for nonbinaryness. I will just have to figure out how to navigate it if I am able to travel to Germany! (boyfriend is considering getting a student visa and studying in Germany in the future, as that entire trip is still apparently less expensive than college in the US)

also I love the weird stupid arguments all languages have

 

depending on how long it takes you to get here maybe people will come up with one, otherwise...yeah you sadly gonna have to pick one by coinflip/lesser evil I'm afraid.

 

Hi, please appreciate this beautiful piece of translation a friend linked me:

Spoiler: animated gif

The joke is that

Spoiler

they miswrote 太 (thick) as 犬 (dog).

 

Very annoyed at the most recent owl update. it has a new feature that supposedly allows you to type in words in the middle of a sentence, except it doesn't trigger my phone's keyboard, so I'm just stuck as fuck.
switched to another lesson but MAN this is annoying

 

it´s Die Nutella. Like Die Marmelade, both sweet things to put on bread.

ETA: In my opinion

 

why so many articles.......

 

I now have a 300 days streak on duolingo's French!

 

we went to critical northwest for a week and that's no service area..... so my streeeeeak, it's Broken

...worth it tho

 

365 days of doulingo french! still so many more days to go probably but! progress!

 

does anyone know any online resources for learning Georgian? it's not on duolingo. alternately, can anyone recommend some reputable non-duolingo sites or apps to check? there's a million "learn languages online fast!" sites out there that i've never heard of and it's hard to tell which ones are good and which ones are shitty and scammy.

(i have absolutely no reason to learn Georgian, but the script is really pretty and i wanted to challenge myself with an agglutinative non-Indo-European language!)