@weaniejeanie53@mas.to @Kay@mastodon.nz @keithreeder@newsie.social It#s always hard to break up the way of thinking and learn to see the world from a different perspective. But it is also very good for the brain. And it's very interesting to see, how different languages and cultures deal with gender. E.g. in German and in Russian, job titles always have a gender. In Germany, it is considered impolite to refer to someone with the wrong gender. You refer to a medical doctor as "Arzt" if they are male and "Ärztin" if they are female. There is a huge debate going on about this, because older texts often only use the male form and this is considered to put women into the role of second class workers. I don't want to go into details of the debate here. What I find interesting about this is, that in Russia, it's the other way around. You always use the male form, because it is considered the default. If you use the female form, you suggest, that the gender is relevant for how they do their job. And then I start to learn Japanese with it's own very different take on gender and it's role in language and society. And yes, in the beginning Japanese is really hard, because there are so many ways of addressing and talking about people and they basically translate all to the same few phrases in English. But it is also quite a lot of fun and interesting and all. It's definitively worth it.