Well, I’m no expert. I just enjoy learning languages and am a native Spanish speaker myself. With regards to the grammar I’m quit lost in my own language, but I can tell you this:
“le” is was and always has been neutral. It and the other examples I gave are just the basis that shows that Spanish is capable of implementing gender neutrality/equality.
I don’t know if you know any Spanish, but every single noun is already gendered. This is more about pronouns getting another third person singular pronoun, and also trying to expand the base of the language and noun or adjectives that are already gendered to include this gender neutrality + equality.
I hope I could answer your question properly, but of not, feel free to elaborate.
Thanks for that! I’ve been learning Spanish for about a year now, but on my own and I don’t know anyone who speaks it. I’m very much still a beginner. I learnt French at school so the idea of gendered nouns wasn’t so much of a problem, but for someone reason indirect object pronouns (I also had no idea what this meant in my native tongue!) have been tripping me up.
“Me gusta mucha esta falda, pero le no quiero comprar” for example. I don’t understand why I’m using “le” when the “it” I’m talking about is feminine.
Or if I want to say “I’ll ask her for her number” it’s “le pediré su numero” (I think, I’m not sure I’ve got the verb form for pedir correct). But what if a boy and girl are standing next to each other, how do you know I’m talking about her if le is gender neutral?
And then sometimes duolingo tells me it’s “la” and I have no idea why! Duo isn’t great for learning more than the basics imo though. I’m sure it will become more natural/easier/I’ll stop over thinking it eventually. It seems like such a silly thing to get caught on, but here I am!
I’ve spoken about this in a learn Spanish sub and someone recommended a book called “English grammar for students of Spanish” or something similar and it’s SO helpful, because no one has ever taught me what an “indirect object pronoun” is in English so it made it really difficult to even describe what I didn’t understand, if that makes sense? Clearly I need to read some more of that book!
Well, a couple things to correct:
“me gusta esta falda, pero no la quiero comprar” (la falda, therefore feminine “la”, so you were correct in your assumption :))
“Le pediré su número”, is more roughly transated to
“I’ll ask for their number”, which like in English might shine some light on how you could be more specific, by providing extra information about the indirect object in question in your sentence to remove uncertainty:
“Le pediré su número a él/a ella” (in your two cases)
Like I said, I’m no good when it comes to grammar, but I can tell you, that there are just so many languages, and many have features that others just don’t (like Russian has no article (definite or indefinite), Arabic has verbs that depend on the gender of the speaker, etc). With Spanish I just know that the biggest hurdles are the past tense, and the gerundive, but I can’t really point you to a good resource other than a book I kind of saw a while back: Pons. I read the “german version” (I think) for learning Spanish (I was tutoring at the time), and it was quite informative but dense. Maybe there’s something for you there as well.
Well, I’m no expert. I just enjoy learning languages and am a native Spanish speaker myself. With regards to the grammar I’m quit lost in my own language, but I can tell you this:
I hope I could answer your question properly, but of not, feel free to elaborate.
Thanks for that! I’ve been learning Spanish for about a year now, but on my own and I don’t know anyone who speaks it. I’m very much still a beginner. I learnt French at school so the idea of gendered nouns wasn’t so much of a problem, but for someone reason indirect object pronouns (I also had no idea what this meant in my native tongue!) have been tripping me up.
“Me gusta mucha esta falda, pero le no quiero comprar” for example. I don’t understand why I’m using “le” when the “it” I’m talking about is feminine.
Or if I want to say “I’ll ask her for her number” it’s “le pediré su numero” (I think, I’m not sure I’ve got the verb form for pedir correct). But what if a boy and girl are standing next to each other, how do you know I’m talking about her if le is gender neutral?
And then sometimes duolingo tells me it’s “la” and I have no idea why! Duo isn’t great for learning more than the basics imo though. I’m sure it will become more natural/easier/I’ll stop over thinking it eventually. It seems like such a silly thing to get caught on, but here I am!
I’ve spoken about this in a learn Spanish sub and someone recommended a book called “English grammar for students of Spanish” or something similar and it’s SO helpful, because no one has ever taught me what an “indirect object pronoun” is in English so it made it really difficult to even describe what I didn’t understand, if that makes sense? Clearly I need to read some more of that book!
Well, a couple things to correct: “me gusta esta falda, pero no la quiero comprar” (la falda, therefore feminine “la”, so you were correct in your assumption :))
“Le pediré su número”, is more roughly transated to “I’ll ask for their number”, which like in English might shine some light on how you could be more specific, by providing extra information about the indirect object in question in your sentence to remove uncertainty: “Le pediré su número a él/a ella” (in your two cases)
Like I said, I’m no good when it comes to grammar, but I can tell you, that there are just so many languages, and many have features that others just don’t (like Russian has no article (definite or indefinite), Arabic has verbs that depend on the gender of the speaker, etc). With Spanish I just know that the biggest hurdles are the past tense, and the gerundive, but I can’t really point you to a good resource other than a book I kind of saw a while back: Pons. I read the “german version” (I think) for learning Spanish (I was tutoring at the time), and it was quite informative but dense. Maybe there’s something for you there as well.