1004: Difficulties with Gender in L2 (g.w.5) Sep 8, 2017

While there are some potential benefits of grammatical gender in terms of the speed of recognition of words, gender can make it harder to learn a language, even if one is somewhat familiar with it. Grammatical gender requires extra memorization, in addition to the vocabulary and other features that someone needs to know when learning another language. Even in languages that are closely related, there is no guarantee that cognates will share the same gender. For instance, in Italian and Portuguese, the word for 'milk', 'il latte and 'o leite' respectively is masculine, but in Spanish 'la leche' is feminine. At best this is only something else to remember, but could also be a source of confusion for interlocutors. Furthermore, while some languages like kiSwahili base their system of noun classes on sound alone, in other languages like French or Spanish where gender is mostly arbitrary, the usual gender of the word can appear to change because its sound. For example, in those two languages, a noun starting with a stressed 'a-', regardless of its gender, would take a masculine article. In Spanish, 'agua' is considered feminine because it is modified by feminine adjectives, but it takes the masculine article 'el' to avoid the more cumbersome sounding 'la agua'. Likewise, the French 'amie' is feminine, and would take the feminine 'ma' in 'ma chère amie' ('my dear friend') when the article is separated from the noun, but when the article and noun appear adjacent it appears as 'mon amie'. Nevertheless, if you ever thought that learning French or Spanish with their two genders, Latin or German with their three genders, or even kiSwahili with its eighteen noun classes would be difficult, keep in mind that the South American language Tuyuca has somewhere between 50-140 noun classes.