"Mon nouveau soutien-gorge à pois est très joli."
Translation:My new polka-dotted bra is very pretty.
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I got the bear! mais le pauvre ours porte un écharpe, pas d'une soutien-gorge....
The male narration makes sense. You could have a male teacher in a classroom read that sentence to you, so you'd hear a male voice. But you'd expect a picture in a book to be of somebody for whom a bra would make sense. Considering how many times Duolingo won't accept a perfectly correct answer to a question because it expects you to go by what you think a picture is supposed to show, I would have expected a picture that corresponded to the sentence, such as a woman, or a man wearing a bra.
Everyone in here all worked up at dots, spots, and polka dots but nobody commenting that the literal translation of bra is "support-throat"!
Especially since "brassiere" sounds like a perfectly cromulent French word itself.
no it's not. it's "support-bosom" (https://www.wordreference.com/fren/gorge). It's just a relic from outdated language.
Jonathan, another lingot for you. The English is so short and sweet. Do the French shorten it as the Germans do? Apparently Büstenhalter is now BH.
As long as "polka-dotted" is still accepted as well since it's in very common usage in the US. We never hear "spotty" in the US. I've only heard it used when in the UK, and usually in reference to teenagers :-)
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In that disney movie with 101 dotted dogs, I heard the phrase "little spotties". That is absolutely american.
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The gender of the noun seems to have nothing to do with the typical gender of the wearer. La chemise, for another example.
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Chemise is shirt, not a blouse (which is sometimes called a chemise in English!). Shirts are usually considered masculine, though today it's more unisex (I'm of the generation which had very distinct garments for each gender!).
I suppose it's feminine because of the construction of the word rather than its meaning. German is very much constructed like that: das Mädchen (the girl) is neuter in gender! It's to do with the ending IIRC - it's been a looooong time since I learned it!
The concept of gender in languages is more akin to a genre than a human gender. The gender called feminine is used for women, and the masculine is used for males, but that really means that the one called masculine is the same as the one used for men, not that the item is inherently male, etc. In fact, in German, the gender for girl is neuter, so language genders aren't strictly tied to biological ones.
A female cat has a masculine gender in French and Spanish. A male cat has a feminine gender in German. And they can be neutral in English, especially if the animal has no given name.
As far as I can tell, the genders are based solely on the sound of the words. La chemise sounds more distinct than le chemise, la chat sounds daft. And I suspect some are just there to avoid confusion - ce ville sounds too similar to Seville...
Why do they use "nouveau" here rather than "neuf"? You would assume that a bra would be brand new, n'est-ce pas?
Marie Antoinette famously asked "does le soutien-gorge " make me look masculine?
Come on, Duo :) I am not trying to be judgemental, but it has to be a male voice to read the text for this one :)
