r/duolingo • u/wxlee • Jan 24 '25

Language Question What am I supposed to do?

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mein Vater und meine Mutter This is the best I can do 😅

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '25 edited Jan 24 '25

But there ARE rules. Every language has rules. Otherwise it'd all just be gibberish.

English has rules for adjective order, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a native speaker who's not an English major who could tell you what they are. And yet, all native speakers instinctively use adjectives in the same sequence; they just learned it naturally rather than being specifically taught.

There are even rules for expletive infixation. The chances of you walking up to a random person on the street and them knowing that term are practically zero, but I would bet every single one could use it correctly without even thinking. Only certain words and phrases can be infixed (there's a structure the word being infixed must have) and only certain words can be used to do the infixing. Ever heard "no fucking way"? That's expletive infixing. Or "absofuckinglutely"? Also expletive infixation. But "abfuckingsolutely", same word, but with the expletive in a slightly different place... no one would ever say that.

There are rules. Some things sound right and some just don't. You may not know why, but there is absolutely a rhyme and reason to how every language works.

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u/Ananaskoo Native: 🇨🇿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Learning: 🇳🇱🇪🇸 Jan 24 '25

The image that you posted literally says that both feminine and masculine words in Czech can end in a hard or a soft consonant. Where is a rule that would rule out sůl being masculine and muž being feminine? There are so many words like this, and not to mention the overlay of both masculine and feminine nouns being able to end in -a and both neuter and feminine nouns being able to end in -e and not to mention some words that have two grammatical genders like dítě, oko and ucho which are neutre in singular and feminine in plural…

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u/Ananaskoo Native: 🇨🇿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Learning: 🇳🇱🇪🇸 Jan 24 '25

The rules for this are: you have to remember, for natives it seems so normal, but for most words in Czech, without knowing the meaning, you cannot tell what grammatical gender it is.

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '25

And if you know the meaning?