| In Spanish, native speakers typically learn (implicitly) or memorize (explicitly) the gendered article along with the noun, so instead of thinking "hmm, let me remember the gender of mapa" they'll just have that noun stored internally as "el mapa". It's still a matter of memorization (at least for words whose gender violates the typically spelling heuristics), but it's not really conceived of as memorizing the word and then separately memorizing its gender. And of course, there will always be rare or specialized terms that a native speaker might recognize but confidently know the gender. This is especially true for the small set of nouns whose gender varies by region or context. |
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| ▲ | pessimizer a day ago | parent [-] | | Except in Spanish, gender is pretty easily determined from the word ending 99.9% of the time unless it's a Greek neuter, and there are only a few of those. In French, it's common for people not to remember the gender of uncommon words. IIRC, there is or was a radio program in France that would call up random people and offer them a prize if they could guess the genders of a list of 10 words correctly. | | |
| ▲ | tshaddox a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > in Spanish, gender is pretty easily determined from the word ending 99.9% of the time unless it's a Greek neuter, and there are only a few of those. Isn't that 99.9% referring to the reliability of spelling heuristics for the words that match a heuristic? For example, the -o and -a spelling heuristic reliably indicates gender something like 99+% of the time, but only about two thirds of Spanish nouns end in -o or -a. There are a few other suffixes with string gender indication, but even then I think you can only account for like 75% of Spanish nouns. | | |
| ▲ | pessimizer a day ago | parent [-] | | I'm strenuously disagreeing with the 75%, especially in terms of usage. Almost all nouns that end in -a (unless they're Greek neuters), -ión, -umbre, or -dad are feminine. Otherwise, they're masculine. There are plenty of exceptions, but 1/1000 words sounds about right to me. edit: my point was that French is far more chaotic than that, and it does cause mistakes. Goes with the general observation that French is easy enough to read, but hard to write. | | |
| ▲ | tshaddox a day ago | parent [-] | | > I'm strenuously disagreeing with the 75%, especially in terms of usage. Oh for sure. I wasn't weighting by usage. |
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| ▲ | pcrh a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | You remind me that France had (maybe still does?) national dictation competitions (championnat national de dictées). Much of French orthography is silent, so can be a real challenge! |
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