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- "Nem, ő nem magas, hanem alac…
9 Comments
You don't. Hungarian does not have genders. When it is important to show the gender, you put a lány, a fiú, anyám, apám anything like that, that by its meaning shows the gender.
I remember a sentence discussion in the Turkish forums where some learners got quite agitated. "But that's important!!! What do you mean, Turkish doesn't distinguish between "he" and "she"? They're not the same! There has to be some way!!!"
I wonder how it will be with the Hungarian course :)
That could be true for all pronouns or even nouns. I think a native English speaker would think I'm an idiot if I asked things like this about English. "When someone writes "I" on the internet, how do I know if that person is male or female? I need to know, they're not the same." "When you said "they", does that mean they're all male, female or a mixed group?" "When you said shop assistant a moment ago, did you mean a male or a female one? How am I supposed to enter the shop without knowing that!" "he" and "she" can be useful but most of the time it's a nuisance not being able to use a proper neutral pronoun but they're so used to it, they can't even think differently. I could tell you a 100 things that I miss from English that I can do in Hungarian but English speakers would just shrug not understanding why I would want to say anything like that. If someone's gender in the third person singular is that important, just add if it's a man or a woman for goodness sake. That's a ridiculous problem. (That wasn't against you by the way.)
You make many good points! As an English speaker I like your point of view. Thanks....
Calling "it" "ő" would be quite odd. Ő sorta implies it's a person (maybe a personalized animal, basically like he/she in English).
Could be both female or male so please dear duolingo do not put an error there
