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Hello italki community! I am from the South West of England and, apart from some secondary school French, I grew up in a monolingual context. Since then I have lived in Ecuador, where I picked up some Spanish, and then studied Italian and Linguistics at university. I am now doing a masters in Applied Linguistics in Barcelona.
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Spanish
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Italian
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Gemma
Spanish
Mar 28, 2018
Ha sido un placer conocer a James ¡hasta pronto!
Activities
  • Posted
    Spanish/Italian speakers!! Nouns with opposing gender?

    Hi/Hola/Ciao!
    This is a question for Spanish and Italian speakers. Can you think of any concrete nouns, everyday objects, that have opposing gender in the two languages? (e.g. lápiz (M) / matita (F))

    Many thanks!


     

    November 13, 2015
    1
    0
  • Posted
    Language complexity and its transfer between languages

    Hello people!

    I'm studying cross linguistic influence, specifically the transfer of meaning between languages, and wanted to ask you a few things about your language learning experience.

    Often researchers look at the mistakes that learners make when speaking or writing in English and through error analysis they determine if these mistakes are due to transfer from the learner's first language. Some features of English can be difficult because they are different or simply don't exist in the learner's first language (e.g. phrasal verbs). 

    What interests me is the opposite! That is when the learner's first language is more 'complex' or contains a feature that is not present in English and can not be accommodated into English.
    (e.g. catergorisation of innanimate nouns into gender groups (SPA - la mesa, ITA - il tavolo, etc.)

     

    Do you have any other examples of this??? Specifically when there is no 'space' for a linguistic feature in English...I'm not so interested in so called untranslatable words, such as 'deja vu'.

    All comments welcome!
    Thank you


    October 23, 2015
    5
    1
  • Answered
    Yes, but my question is about grammatical gender in the grouping of nouns, not pronouns.
    0 voted
    October 16, 2015
    0
  • Posted
    Which other languages are without gender in nouns (as with English)? Does your first language have grammatical gender for nouns? Does it have masculine, feminine, neuter groups? Do you find it strange when you use English and you can't include this feature?! I'd love to hear your comments :)
    October 16, 2015
    7
    0