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Trick question, washing machines come in many different genders:
Die Waschmaschine die
This is my go to response when people are trying to claim that English is hard… Well at least I don’t have to remember what gender has randomly been assigned to every noun I want to use.
End-syllables help a long way:
For example the often cited neutral: girl/Mädchen is a diminutive. So everything with -chen or -lein becomes neutral and therefore: das.
(Brötchen, Männlein, Häuschen, Fräulein)
https://mein-deutschbuch.de/genusbestimmung.html#nachsilben
As a bonus: in plural everything is “die” so just formulate everything in plural and you are always right.
The problem though is when you get into figuring out if it is in the nominative, accusative, dative, or genitive case.
Der Hund can easily be turned into den Hund, dem Hund, or des Hundes if you aren’t careful.
And for the love of God, don’t ask me anything about subjunctive case 😮💨
If you get the wrong one just accuse the examiner of being transphobic.
It’s probably makes sense once explained properly but as an outsider to gendered languages in general it feels like the stupidest archaic idea ever lol.
How aggregious is misgendering items in other languages? I assume it’s no big deal and may not even be worth correcting most of the time?
In German, they sometimes add the gender into the word. Like if you hire a few “Stripper” in German, they will be all male, while “Stripperinnen” would be all female and there is no generally accepted way if you want a mix or non-binaries, you’d have to describe it. This can lead to quite a lot of confusion, especially with words derived from English like this.
So what I’m saying is, if you use the English word and misgender, it can be a big deal. Like 7 or 8 inches big, on some occasions.
Female in Russian, because the word machine/машина ends with A, and so any machine, from tattoo gun to steam engine is female gendered. I always thought French and German worked in somewhat similar manner?
I didn’t learn of any rhyme or reason to it in German when I took classes on it. In fact, in a few cases, the gender changes the meaning of the word. Der See und die See, for example. One means lake and the other means sea/ocean.
OMG, I’ve been doing my Duolingo lessons and never realised that they had different meanings, I just thought Germans used one word for all bodies of water 😭
“Die See” denotes an ocean, “der See” denotes a lake. You will more often hear “das Meer” instead of “die See” tho.
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