You know everytime your mention French number, there is always belgian or Swiss who will tell you :

🇧🇪🇨🇭: 90+7

☝️🤓

what the actual fuck is wrong with you, denmark?

While learning Danish I figured out that's just the arcane incantation for the number. It's language juju, and you just have to know that it be like it do. Yes, it's syv og halvfems, but the reason behind it doesn't matter anymore. The rest of the double digit numbers are a mess as well; 30 is tredive (three tens in old norse) but starting with 50 it's this weird score (20) and half-to-score system.

"Stupid fucking foreigner thinking my bread has a dick..."

I remember standing in line for crepes in Le Havre, I just had my first year of French in school and I was practicing how to order in my head, nervously repeating "un crepe avec sucre", and killed myself over not remembering the gender of crepe. So it's finally my turn in line and I order nervously (I am 13 years old) and they reply with "pancake with sugar, no problem" and I'm just like 😭

Somehow people not even giving you a chance to practice your language skills is awful

Baguettes are distinctly penis shaped, so the French are just wrong about that.

Just because your ears can't hear a difference doesn't mean that there is none. I deal with this a lot when Japanese ask me for help and can't differentiate between certain sounds

No offense intended since I'm fully incapable of pronouncing tons of English words properly (fuck "squirrel" specifically), but as a Frenchman who has lived near Mulhouse for a few years and interacted with a lot of foreign students, what you said probably wasn't close to being the exact same as that guy

I believe women sometimes use them to aid in the release of gender fluid.

You can use gender powder too

And now I will sit back and watch how many people get mad at me because they don't understand sarcasm.

Really getting worked up over that imaginary person you created huh? Lol

No. It's feminine because you put dirty things in it.

EDIT: I'm going to get lynched by the hyper vigilant with you. We're in this together now.

It's a little bit worse than that in fact. "Programmiererinnen und Programmierer" or "Programmierer:innen" or "Programmierende". And if you get it wrong you are not a grammar nazi but more of a regular nazi.

/s just in case

Spanish speaker here. For as chaotic and wild as English is, I've always appreciated that it has no gendered nouns. Why are chairs female? Makes no sense

I don't know what you're on about. It's "die Waschmaschine" (washing machine, female), "das Waschmittel" (laundry detergent, neutral) and "der Trockner" (dryer, male).

Pretty self explanatory /s

Disclaimer: this is terrible advice if you are trying to actually learn the proper grammar, don’t follow it.

That being said, you can get by in everyday situations perfectly fine using "De" for anything, especially if you have a foreign accent people will forgive you.

De junge, de Mädchen, de Baby, de Tisch, de Stuhl, de Feuerzeuggas-Nachfüllkartusche. People will understand.

I'm not an expert. But I believe it is something to do with information redundancy.

If you mishear a word but surrounding words must match gender and number, you may reconstruct the misheard word.

As a native spanish speaker, I don't think of the actual sexuality of objects, it's just a characteristic of the word that should match other words in the sentence. For example the word screen (pantalla) is femenine, and the word monitor (monitor) is masculine. So when I see my monitor I don't think of an actual female or male object. But the nouns should match adjectives gender, so if someone says "broken monitor" (monitor roto) or "broken screen" (pantalla rota) I have this kind of redundancy if I misheard a word.

But I'm not an expert of linguistics. Don't quote me.

Speaking as a gendered language user (Italian) it is sometimes weird.

For example, car is feminine but our name for an off-road vehicle is masculine, as is the word for truck. Since you have to apply the gender of the noun to verbs, articles and adjectives, which one do you use when talking about your SUV? Feminine because it's a car or masculine because it's an offroader?

For borrowed words there's usually a consensus on gender that forms over time. Sometimes a borrowed word inherits its gender from the translation of that word that fell out of use. One example of this could be the word computer. An equivalent term exists in Italian (calcolatore) which fell out of use but gave it a definite gender, masculine.

What exactly does gender achieve in a language? Is English missing out on any nuance?

Sort of. Grammatical gender and the interplay with grammatical case (the "role" of a noun in a sentence) allows some extra meaning to be packed in. For example, German has 3 genders and 4 cases leading to 12 different contexts for nouns to be in. Many of those have their own conjugation patterns, and separate words for the articles "a/the".
That can, theoretically, allow meaning of the type "whose what did what to whom" to be obvious or pieced together in a sentence, whereas translating it into English you might need to spell it out, lose it, or rely on context.

In practice, a lot of that sort of information is often redundant or clear from context anyway, and only matters if you're being clever or succinct. My German is shit, so I will not try to provide examples.

It's also worth pointing out that it's a naturally occurring feature, likely arisen by accident.

Is it literally thinking about nouns as male or female, or is it just a weird name for the concept?

It is mostly just a weird name. Some of it makes sense along (social) gender lines, much of it makes no sense at all. This thread is full of good examples of counterintuitive noun genders in all kinds of languages.

Who decides gender when a new noun is made? What about borrowed words from other languages?

The speakers of the language, collectively, usually with some disagreement, trial and error. Borrowing depends: a gendered noun borrowed into a non-gendered language would just slip in there. In the reverse case, people would just arrive at some gender for it arbitrarily or based on similar words, what gender any "parts" of the term might be if translated, or whatever other method. There's no correct answer.

Do you sound stupid if you speak French without using it, or are you just a language hipster?

Quite likely. There's no "without it" in gendered languages, it is a more or less fundamental part of the noun and the language, like how certain nouns and verbs are just different in English. Dropping random grammar and syntax from English would just be "doing it wrong", ranging from cute foreign accent quirks to Ralph Wiggum's cave-dwelling ancestor.

Of course, fucking up is unavoidable when learning languages, and most people will give you a lot of leeway due to being foreign. Maybe not everywhere in France, though...

Of course! Hitler proved all right wing Germans are pussies with dicks.

Sorry to disappoint, a dish washer is "un lave-vaisselle", which is masculine. A car however is "une voiture", maybe there's a joke in there about how manly men love their car more than their gf.