Mixing Up He and She in English as a Non-Native Speaker

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, how are you guys doing?

I am calling from Houston.

My name is Syed.

What can we help you with, Syed?

I have recently moved to the States.

It’s about two years.

But since I’ve been here, what I do when I talk to somebody, if I’m, for example, talking about my father, I would mix up the genders.

I would say she instead of he.

Or if I’m talking about a lady, I would call him instead of her or something like this.

I don’t know why that’s happening.

I’m really confused.

My mother tongue is Urdu.

I’m from Pakistan.

And I also speak Punjabi.

But this is something that’s very weird.

I think I understand good English.

I can speak right.

But the gender mix-up is something that I am really confused about.

I don’t know why that’s happening to me.

Syed, your English sounds great to me for somebody who’s been in the United States for just a couple of years.

I assume that you studied English and Pakistan as well?

Yes, I have, but my English is at this stage just because of the movies I’ve watched all the time.

Hollywood has impacted me, and I’ve read books.

That helped a lot.

But getting those pronouns wrong, getting the gendered pronouns wrong, must be embarrassing sometimes.

Oh, yes, it is.

I think there’s a good explanation here.

I don’t speak Urdu, and I don’t know very much about it, but I believe that there’s no actual gendered pronouns, right?

Oh, yes.

In English, we say he and she.

Like he went to the store and she went to work, that sort of thing.

But in Urdu and Hindi and related languages, you don’t.

There’s no, it’s the same pronoun regardless of whether you’re speaking about a man or a woman, right?

Oh, yes, yes. Now I get it. Yes, that’s true.

Because we have a word that’s pronounced wo or unhe or usko.

So these are the words that, you know, they don’t have gender thing going on with it.

Right. You might have grammatical gender, but it’s not it’s not actual gender.

It’s not actually referring to a man or actually referring to a woman.

And so it’s hard to make that move where you now have to think about this information in a new language and be conscious of that.

I know that when English speakers then go to other countries where we have to do things like think about, I’m thinking about different cases, for example, attached to verbs where we have to think about location.

When we’re conjugating verbs, like wherever a thing is in order to come up with the proper conjugation verb, our minds are blown.

Because ordinarily in English, we don’t have to think about location when we conjugate a verb.

It’s just very difficult for us.

Yeah, or just matching the gender of an adjective to a noun.

Yeah, the grammatical gender, not the actual human gender, not the male-female gender.

Yeah.

So that’s a very understanding.

Actually, it’s an incredibly common mistake for people who speak Urdu or Hindi.

Oh, okay.

I didn’t know that.

Yeah, it’s very common.

And the only way out of it is practice, I’m afraid.

Yeah, well, I’ve been practicing for two years now.

You sound really, you sound very good to me.

Yeah, you sound great.

Yeah, well, the other thing was that, you know, when I’m listening to somebody, I have to translate it into Urdu and then understand it and then speak it out in English and translate it again.

But I’ve gotten over that a lot.

But the gender thing was very confusing now.

And that’s a good explanation.

Yeah.

Well, it sounds like you’re well on your way.

Seriously.

If you’re in a retail position where you’re having conversations with English speakers all day long, you are in a perfect position to be very fluent in no time at all.

This is just the optimal situation for getting your English in order.

A lot of practice.

Yes, exactly.

Syed, call us again in a couple years and let us know how it’s going, all right?

Oh, yeah. Thank you very much for your time, guys.

Our pleasure. Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We loved hearing Syed’s story about language, and we’d love to hear your experiences with language.

So give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your questions and stories to words@waywordradio.org.