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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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For what it's worth, you don't memorize the gender of things. It's just difficult, when you learn another language that does it differently. And that's true for every language you learn, the difficulty lies in how it's different of your own.
I mean, you do memorise them, you just don't realise you're doing it because you're a baby or toddler and babies and toddlers are language sponges, and not very aware of how their own minds work.
When learning a gendered language as an adult you definitely have no option but to memorise what gender each word uses, since there's generally no specific rule, just how the language happened to evolve. (And this can be particularly hard if your native language is gendered, but you're trying to learn one that genders words differently, for instance when learning German coming from a Romance language, or vice versa.)
Young minds be like
No, you don't memorize it. You memorize the words and how they sound, then based on how their endings sound, you know their gender. You don't have to maintain a dictionary of words to their gender. There are a few exceptions and you memorize those, but for the most part all you need to memorize is a few rules.
Potahto potayto. 🤷♂️
Not really. In case you’re not catching the implication, it means there is no more memorization of words’ gender in Spanish than there is in English, for instance.
You simply do not need to memorize gender as it can and is derived on the spot from other memorized info, ie the word itself.
Except many languages' vocabularies share common roots (e.g. Latin and Greek) even if the languages themselves don't, so quite often someone learning Spanish will be able to make an educated attempt at figuring out the equivalent Spanish word (for instance, an English speaker might figure out that machine ≈ máquin_)... but will have no clue about the gender, having a 50% chance of ending up with, say, máquino.
And, as I said, misgendering words seems to be a relatively common mistake for people learning Spanish without having a Romance language base.