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There's burnout and there's this...

@phranck
Sorry, did the op specify the person’s gender?

@phranck Ah! Yeah, I can imagine that the singular genderless “they” isn’t something they teach in formal English language instruction, even though it’s common in everyday usage.

@inthehands @phranck There’s also that since German is a “gendered” language we grow up thinking of literally everything having a gender. House, car, tree etc. We even assign (and sometimes disagree about 😆) gender for English words used in German. Classic: die Email.

It’s a hard thing to unlearn. When we see “teacher” we tend to think of a male person, because -er is the male suffix in German.

They/them is beautiful and so much simpler than our workarounds dealing with this in German.

@finestructure @phranck
There’s a classic Calvin and Hobbes about this: gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2

We have very much the same struggles in English when pronouns enter the picture — but at least it’s only pronouns and not all nouns!

GoComics · Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for February 26, 2014 | GoComics.com

@inthehands @phranck ❤️ Calvin & Hobbes.

What messes with me learning French is that while English pronouns agree with the subject, in French they agree with the object.

German is the killer though, because it does both 🤪 Glad I didn’t have to learn •that• as a foreign language.

I love the complexities of and differences between languages.

Paul Cantrell

@finestructure @phranck
If you are a sucker for languages, you might enjoy this daily Wordle-like game:
lingule.xyz/

The UI is glitchy, but it’s a lot of fun if you bear with it. Don’t neglect clicking the arrow to get a map. (I lost myself use the full research power of the web, just not to look up the word itself or copy and paste characters from its writing system.)

lingule.xyzLinguleA fun little language game