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Non-neutral nouns have always struck me as odd. They provide no info gain whatsoever outside of actually providing a gender if you're referring to a person or animal (for example, in Spanish, gato -> male cat, gata -> female cat). And in those situations, a short sentence can provide instant clarification if needed in a non-gendered language like English.
It's a language feature built to be helpful in one use case, whilst simultaneously being worse in about a bazillion others. It's a very odd choice.
There's an argument to be made that it might help clarifying when speaking to someone. Consider these two German sentences:
"Der rote Apfel" – the red apple
"Die rote Ampel" – the red traffic light
Imagine a noisy environment, a quiet speaker or some other problem and you only understand
"Die rote A***el" – the red x***xx
In a language like English, you don't have enough information to understand the meaning. The German gender system helps to direct your possible matching words (Ampel or Apfel) to the correct one, as "Die rote Apfel" is grammatically incorrect.
Another point I want to make is that it isn't "being worse in about a bazillion other" use cases. Native speakers don't really have an issue with noun class systems. It's just very unintuitive and tedious for non-native language learners to memorize all the genders of nouns.
I'd like to interject for a bit, if I may.
While german has cases, somewhat more complex verbs and gendered nouns, english also has its peculiarities that make it hard for non-natives to learn. Things like spelling and using the same word in a bazillion contests and methaphor-based idioms come to mind first. There are also simple-to-understand pecularities like its/it's and paid/payed which not even natives get right sometimes.
The point being, for all the "hard" and "useless" parts of one language the other language (as it's always comomparing apoles to oranges) has similarily "hard" and "useless" features itself, so in my opinion it more or less evens out.
What makes a language "easier" or "harder" to learn is how much of it you already know. In other words that's usually how similar it is to the languages you know already.
That doesn't mean that a language can't have more pointlessly convoluted things than another language. For example, counting in French.
I'd argue english ortography is a lot more pointlessly convoluted than french numbers (*cough* *cough* ough)
I mostly agree. Sorry if it came out that way, but my comment was not meant to be stating that English is way easier than German. Just wanted to point out that this "hard" and "useless" feature is not that useless and only hard for language learners.
And then there's the different ways to connect verbs in English.
- I want to go to the movies. ("I want going" is wrong.)
- I like going to the movies. / I like to go to the movies. (Both ways work.)
- I despise going to the movies. ("I despise to go" is wrong.)
There aren't rules for that, as far as I know. Just very fuzzy guidelines at best. And word stress is pretty random too. Both of those things can be tricky for non-native speakers.
And why did we in school made listening comprehensions for English where you would need to understand people speaking in the middle of a construction side next to a heavy used road?
I mean even in German I wouldn't have understood them but I got an bad grade because I didn't understand it in English.
Wait until you hear that sometimes we can use both pronoums with some words but not others.
We can say "el mar" the(male) sea, or "la mar" the(female) sea. But you would never say "la oceano" it's only "el oceano" the(male) ocean.