English weirdly use feminine for ships, so think of it like that. But no it doesn’t achieve much.
I don’t think it change the way we think about objects much, but probably unconsciously yes. For example, France itself is feminine and seeing some caricature personifying as a dude always feels weird.
Usage dictates the gender. And some recent words are more or less controversial: gameboy, wifi, COVID, Nutella…
When I think about the gender of a word I will usually derive it from a broader category. But that’s not always obvious, for example Gameboy is a game console (feminine) but the words game and boy are masculine. COVID is a disease (feminine) but also a virus (masculine). And in the meme a washing machine is a machine (feminine).
You can’t not use gender since french doesn’t have neutral pronouns. But I don’t think it’s frowned upon for a non native speaker to make this kind of mistakes.
English weirdly use feminine for ships, so think of it like that. But no it doesn’t achieve much.
I don’t think it change the way we think about objects much, but probably unconsciously yes. For example, France itself is feminine and seeing some caricature personifying as a dude always feels weird.
Usage dictates the gender. And some recent words are more or less controversial: gameboy, wifi, COVID, Nutella…
When I think about the gender of a word I will usually derive it from a broader category. But that’s not always obvious, for example Gameboy is a game console (feminine) but the words game and boy are masculine. COVID is a disease (feminine) but also a virus (masculine). And in the meme a washing machine is a machine (feminine).
You can’t not use gender since french doesn’t have neutral pronouns. But I don’t think it’s frowned upon for a non native speaker to make this kind of mistakes.