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Comment by dustintrex | Hacker News Reader

This is a running joke among Japanese language learners, but less of an actual problem than you'd think. The really feminine words (atashi, kashira, ending sentences with wa etc) are trivially avoided, so you end up with neutral/excessively polite/gaijinkusai but not particularly feminine language.

For what it's worth, few foreigners master Japanese to the level where they could convincingly sound like a tough male/gangster, but unless you actually are in the Yakuza, this ability is not particularly useful. Sonai yuun yattara ippen washi no chinpo shabutte miruka?

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> This is a running joke among Japanese language learners, but less of an actual problem than you'd think.

I have gotten some comments about my Chinese being somewhat feminine. I don't speak, so this is all based on text messaging. And Chinese doesn't have overt gender-of-speaker markers, so the issue persists even if you avoid those.

I particularly remember one person commenting that making the agreement / I'm-listening noise in two syllables, 嗯嗯, was "cute" where a man should have just said 嗯. Apparently, this is the kind of thing that will get you.

For what it's worth, in my face-to-face interactions with Chinese men, I got a lot more criticism for the fact that all of the acquaintances I ever mentioned were female than for my choice of words in the rare case where I spoke in Chinese. But again, speaking Chinese is mostly restricted to text messages for me.

> 嗯嗯, was "cute" where a man should have just said 嗯. Apparently, this is the kind of thing that will get you.

Chinese people that I have talked to in Shanghai laughed at me when I said I liked using stickers (表情包)/emoji on WeChat. Apparently, guys are hardly meant to use them and that stickers/emoji are for girls.

Personally, I didn't take heed of their advice nor cared as everybody has their own way of communicating. I use 嗯嗯 stickers whenever I feel like it instead of 嗯. I use 哦 sometimes instead of 嗯 to annoy people and act like I am paying attention.

As an Asian guy, most of my friends/acquaintances in China are female. I have no issues talking to Chinese guys but tend to get on well with females there I guess.

However, back in London where I grew up, almost all of my friends are male. Confused? So am I.. lol.

I disagree. Yes, it's trivial to avoid saying Atashi and ending sentence in wa, but feminine language differences are a lot more pervasive than that. There's a ton of subtle stuff, and you end up sounding strange if you aren't really careful. To just give one example, there are a ton of places you can choose to throw in an o- or not, just like in English, you can choose to say "the" or not. As in English, it's about pattern matching and getting used to the subtle frequencies for this stuff. Just like French people sound silly when they use "the" in the wrong places, a man sounds silly when using o- in the wrong places.

> To just give one example, there are a ton of places you can choose to throw in an o- or not, just like in English, you can choose to say "the" or not.

Definiteness marking is certainly an area where speakers of languages that don't do that get confused. But I'm not comfortable saying that there are a ton of places in English where you can choose to say "the" or not. In most cases, there's only one correct choice.

Going back over the nouns in my previous paragraph: (marking area[0] speakers[1] languages[2] I ton[0] places English you cases choice[1] [there])

[0] rival article already marked

[1] "the" permissible; presence and absence are both fine

[2] "the" possible; presence may raise eyebrows

I think GP was talking about honorific/humble o not the object marker o, and chose a poor metaphor. Because honorific/humble o is often a signal for feminine language... there was a trending tiktok video about prefixing "toilet" with "o" for example.

If I meant the direct object postposition, I would write “-wo” not “o-”.

The problem with o- is that both men and women use it, but women use it slightly more, and getting that right is hard for a non-native.

If the overusing of the articles makes me sound like the Starfire, so be it!

I think that exists in most languages, including English! I also don't think it's too much of a problem, since once you have exposure to a broader spectrum of people you start to pick up what is masculine / feminine speech and how different social classes talk.

This is one of ways I can tell whether email was written by the native English speaker. Articles are missing or in wrong place.

The plurals is other dead giveaway. Apparently articles and plurals are very difficult in English, but to me--a native English speaker--they are the most natural thing in the world.

Of course I'm complete shit at the Latin-based languages because I can never get the masculine/feminine words right.

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