Clarification Edit: for people who speak English natively and are learning a second language

  • intensely_human
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    11 days ago

    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.

      • intensely_human
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        11 days ago

        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.

        • leftzero@lemmynsfw.com
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          10 days ago

          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 machinemáquin_)… 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.