sc94597 on 22 October 2009
| Final-Fan said: I think the complaint about having various genders for nouns with no apparent rhyme or reason (see c03n3nj0's example) is that learning it is complete brute force memorization. And complete nonsense from the perspective of an English speaker like me. Maybe it's not a big deal if you're used to it, but for me it's like "the sun is male? WTF." |
Yes, as a secondary language it is very difficult. Actually it is the most difficult thing I have to deal with in French. That doesn't mean to a native speaker who speaks it everyday that it would be more difficult than grammatical rules though. They speak it everyday, and after a while the gender is embedded into their mind. It is akin to learning the conjugations of an irregular verb in english or any other language for that matter . You might not know the rules behind learning the verb, but you do know how to say all of it's forms due to repitition.
