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Comment by shayanbahal | Hacker News Reader

As a non-native speaker, and coming from "genderless languages"[1], Persian, it took me quite some time to get used to gender based pronouns. With the new pronoun restructure in the English language in north America, I'm having hard time to understand how to talk amongst strangers (people whom I'm not familiar with their preferred pronouns) .

[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderles...

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>I'm having hard time to understand how to talk amongst strangers (people whom I'm not familiar with their preferred pronouns)

If you're ever worried about how you'll be perceived in these kinds of scenarios, just make sure you're speaking with enough of an accent to communicates English is not your first language. The people who would otherwise be offended will not recognize you a target of the current cultural tensions that pronouns represent.

And then they'll be offended that you are a bigger minority than them

As a Finn I can second this. It took me a while to remember to use the correct pronoun and still get it wrong sometimes (by defaulting to he/him if I don't pay attention to it)

I don't know Mandarin, but my Chinese PhD supervisor does this all the time, always accidentally using he/him to refer to women. Unfortunately that can be a pretty dangerous mistake to make

It totally blows my mind that there are languages without gendered pronouns. It's like someone saying "mother" and "father" were the same word (just "parent", no specialized words by gender) in a language.

Translating from English to Persian must be tough, no? For example I did this test in Google Translate and it appeared to strip the second sentence of it's meaning, making the person that put the chicken in the oven ambiguous:

> Sam and Sally went home. Once there, she put the chicken in the oven.

> سام و سالی به خانه خود رفتند. پس از آنجا ، او مرغ را در اجاق قرار داد.

Yes the second part of the sentence is mainly saying "that person", and doesn't indicate the gender.

You may be surprised on how this ambiguity can be beneficial, specially in teenage years when talking about your "friend" will not reveal their gender :)

As a teenager I missed in English having a clear difference between girl friend and girlfriend or betweens boy friend and boyfriend.

Spanish has very different words for amigo/novio, or amiga/novia.

You can always say "Once there, the girl put the chicken in the oven.".

There's a different, perhaps even worse, pitfall for people coming from gendered languages where the gender of a possessive pronoun agrees with the thing possessed rather than the person possessing. I have heard Spanish people say things like "I saw Joe Biden and her wife on television".

This happens because his/her/their are all "su" in Spanish.

You can ignore preferred pronouns until someone tells but even then it doesn't matter. It didn't affect the language at all.

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