Le Dimanche 2 Novembre 2003 16:56, Hugo Vanwoerkom a déclamé : > Christophe Courtois wrote: > > Le Dimanche 2 Novembre 2003 03:42, Wesley J Landaker a déclamé : > >>a native French speaker, and although I've got *fairly* good inuition > >>into a word's gender, I still make mistakes! ;) > > Don't worry, even French people don't always know all genders :-) > True, but having lived in Mexico for the last 10 years and speaking > Spanish, I note with regret that genders are "built-in" and if you come > from a more or less genderless background (the Netherlands, US) then > you never get it: it just refuses to become automatic.
As there is almost no logic, this normal. And it changes from language to language: when speaking German I always wonder which gender to use for half of words - and they have three genders... :-( When learning Latin, I had to learn many of them too - as French comes from it, you could expect some coherence - but no! -- Christophe Courtois - Ostwald, Alsace, France http://www.courtois.cc/ - Clé PGP : 0F33E837 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- A black hole is when the gods divide by zero And a galaxy is a core dump when a segmentation fault occurs. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
