Re: The Birds and the Bees of Gender

Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> But for a Japanese speaker, it is a
> difficulty that doesn't exist in their language, and they think they don't
> need it (and in fact, they do it very well without plural), and when they
> learn English, they just say: but why must I always use the plural even
> when I think number is irrelevant? Why must I use the plural when I count
> objects? I use a number, so I don't need to add the plural to the noun.
> Everybody knows with the number that there are several objects...
Judging from the speech errors I encountered during my TESL days, plural
in and of itself is not that big of a mind-bender for Chinese and
Japanese speakers (sentencese like "I have three book" were quite
uncommon). The greater bugaboo, I think, is the seemingly arbitrary
distinction between countable and uncountable nouns. Liquids are
uncountable? Okay. But "rice" is uncountable while "peas" (at least in
modern usage) are countable. "Lettuce" (in my idiolect) is uncountable
(unless you're distinguishing between, say, escarole and romaine, you
can't say "a lettuce") -- my Japanese housewife class really had a had
time getting a handle on that one ("Sure you can count them, see? One,
two, three...") And so on. Chinese-English and Japanese-English
dictionaries mark every noun entry as either "C" or "U" (a la "m." and
"f." of Romance lang dictionaries) and many beginning students just slog
away and memorize it the way beginning American students of French have
to memorize that it's "*une* table" but "*un* lit". "One carrot, two
carrot_s_" but "*some* asparagus."

Kou