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Sep 21 '19
As I understand, they originally had the same character too.
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u/Dickcheese_McDoogles Sep 21 '19
They did. It was actually after 1900 that a writer coined the new gender distinction in the writing
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u/Maciston Sep 21 '19
So, the question is, why would China adopt both 他 and 她, but not both 你 and 妳.
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Sep 21 '19
Actually 伊 has been used in literature to refer to females in the third person. But it's hardly ever used in modern times.
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u/ienorikuma Sep 21 '19
When you see that they have gender-neutral pronouns and think they must be pretty progressive....
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u/ienorikuma Sep 21 '19
When you were using Duolingo and you typed what you heard but the bird said you were wrong for using 他 instead of 她.
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Sep 21 '19
Apparently this trips up a lot of Mandarin native speakers when they’re learning a language that has verbally distinct pronouns. My dad in particular is really bad about mixing up he/she so he’ll say stuff like “he is my daughter”
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u/CosmicBioHazard Sep 21 '19
Mandarin speakers trip up on a lot of grammar points in foreign language in general. People drill vocabulary heavily and don’t even look at inflection.
I think that’s more a failing of the textbooks though. Chinese English textbook publishers don’t include anything about grammar in their books whatsoever. When I did French in Grade school we got conjugation tables, lists of exceptions, all kinds of stuff.
Also they seem to calque 足球 directly into “football” and it never gets corrected.
That last part was sarcasm.
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Sep 21 '19
Could also be an age thing. I imagine that English curriculums in today’s China look very different from the nonexistent schools around my dad’s time/area. He’s not even that old
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u/marpocky Sep 22 '19
Mandarin speakers trip up on a lot of grammar points in foreign language in general.
Indeed, but gender confusion in pronouns is the only point that's relevant to this specific thread.
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Sep 22 '19
That’s true, but most language learners will carry over tendencies from their native language to the language they’re learning. For example, for a while I'd use 面試 for “interview” in the context of a news interview, but the correct word is 採訪. 面試 is interview in the sense of looking for jobs, but English doesn’t make this distinction, so it took me a while to get used to that.
Mandarin speakers also have trouble with tense and plurals because both don’t exist in their language. Conversely, English speakers have trouble with the word order, tones, and things like 了or 把 constructions, so everyone’s got their struggles.
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u/Krappatoa Sep 21 '19
Yeah I hear that all the time. It is really difficult for them to ever learn it.
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u/noselace Sep 21 '19
It took me a couple of weeks after I started learning before I realize they were different!
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u/DanSensei Sep 22 '19
In some apps, when they need a gender neutral pronoun (like they say reply to this person) it'll say ta in English letters, like "回ta"
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u/[deleted] Sep 21 '19
A joke on this sub I understand? It’s more likely than you think.