I promise this will be the last chapter on grammar.
The problem is that you can't really talk about learning a language without tangling with the grammar problem. And it's important that we get a really firm idea of what we're going to encounter before we go sailing off into uncharted waters of a foreign language without a map and some explanation of all the shoals.
This time we're going to talk about a gender gap—one gap that we are probably never going to be able to close.
For some reason or other, in nearly every European language, including French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and even Arabic and Hebrew, there is a curious feature that to our way of thinking is hard to explain. (I've already tried to explain some curious features in other languages that at least have some practical explanation and use. But in this case I have no useful explanation. It's just life…)
Speakers of these languages—starting way back in early history—somehow ended up categorizing every single noun in the language into a class of either masculine, feminine, and sometimes neuter.
OK, so what's unusual about that? We do something of the same in English. “Man, bull, boy, rooster, husband, father”, etc., are masculine words in English and we refer to them as “he”. Similarly we take words like “girl, daughter, cow, mother, witch” etc., and think of them as feminine, referring to them as “she”. And words like “house, car, coal, sky” and so on we think of as having no gender, or neuter, and we refer to them as “it.”
Ah, but these European languages do categorize words like house, car, sky, boat, water, etc as being masculine or feminine. In French and Spanish, for example, every single noun in the language falls into one of these categories. In French the words for house, box, strength, chair, demonstration, glory, street, and so on are all feminine. The word for “the” with these words is “la”. But other words like castle, dog, cake, message, government, paper and so on are masculine. The word for “the” with these words is always “le”.
That's not all. When you use an adjective with these words like “white paper” or “big street” or “heavy chair”, you have to put a masculine or feminine ending on the adjective to “agree” with the noun. Nuisance? Certainly is, from our point of view. To a Frenchman of course, it comes as naturally as cooking with wine.
Even worse, some languages, German and Russian for example, use all three categories—masculine, feminine, and neuter. So with each word you have to memorize its grammatical gender. (This is the kind of extra information that you might write down on your word card when you come to memorize the word.) Just as French has two different words for “the” depending on whether the word is masculine or feminine, German has three different words for “the”—“der” “die” and “das”—for masculine, feminine, and neuter. Russian has no word for “the”, but you still need to ensure that the corresponding masculine, feminine, or neuter ending is put on any adjective that goes with the noun. What's more, there is no logic about which word falls into which category of grammatical gender. You can't guess from what the word means as to whether it is masculine or feminine—unless it is a word like father or mother or boy or girl—and even here there is no guarantee.
Don't blame me. I didn't invent the rules. I'm just trying to prepare you for what's coming up when you start. And just to rub it in, the Chinese think all this gender business is silly and unnecessary anyway. We already mentioned earlier that the Chinese (and Turks, and Persians, and Japanese, among others) find it good enough to use one word for “he”, “she”, and “it”. These are languages without gender gaps.
Don't let all of this discourage you. It may seem strange, or a nuisance at first, but you'll get used to it pretty fast. The good news is that there are even rules in most of these languages which let you guess a good percentage of the time what gender a word happens to be—depending on the letters that it ends in.
In all, this is one gender gap that can't be overcome by legislation. The only way to overcome this one is by memorization. But, as the French say, Vive la difference! (In French différence is feminine).
1. Most European languages categorize every single noun in the language into one of two (masculine and feminine) or one of three (masculine, feminine and neuter) gender categories—regardless of the meaning of the word.
2. The gender of the word often affects the grammatical endings of other, related words.
3. Always learn the gender of each word as you learn the word, perhaps noting it on your word card along with the noun.