Wow, Hebrew! That's awesome. My husband knows some Hebrew from classes in college. How did you come to learn Hebrew, is it a native language for you or did you study it?
Native language for me, though I've absorbed English fairly early on and using it consistently for many years (especially once I rolled onto the internet and found myself in nigh-constant contact with mostly English speakers) kind of ingrained it in my brain as something that almost feels like a second native language – on multiple occasions, I found myself having that "... I know exactly how to convey this in [Language A], how do I say this in [Language B]?" feeling in
both directions.
For those of you who speak multiple languages, what's something you wish English had that's in your language? Or if you prefer in reverse, what's something you wish your language had that it does not?
One of my annoyances with Hebrew when compared to English is that Hebrew is a gendered language without a neuter form (and words are assigned genders in what is sometimes a completely arbitrary way) and features declension that is also affected by grammatical gender. This also means it does not have any equivalent to the singular "they" – the equivalent pronoun is exclusively plural in Hebrew, and even then, it is also gendered: there's a masculine form and a feminine form of the plural they/them-equivalent pronoun, and since there's no separate neuter form, the masculine-plural form takes precedent when referring to a mixed-gender group of people or things, at least as far as "correct" grammar goes (There is, naturally,
a whole lot of discourse about this, but it's probably not going to change significantly anytime soon).
The headache this leaves me with is twofold.
For one, it means that when I translate things from English to Hebrew, unless a client has provided me with specific instructions to use a particular form of address, if I want to be as inclusive as possible, I may have to compromise the flow of some sentences by either using a plural form of address (where again, because how Hebrew works, masculine-plural is taken as neutral-plural) or shifting from active to passive (e.g. "take the following steps" to "the following steps should be taken", essentially). Most of the time this can be managed and results in something that sounds natural, but it
can sound a bit wonkier than it could have on occasion.
It also means that it's next to impossible not to misgender nonbinary people/characters who use pronouns other than he/him or she/her without constantly adding disclaimers, or swapping from masculine to feminine and vice versa mid-sentence (which isn't exactly elegant either), or trying to force the plural they/them into a singular use case in Hebrew (which unlike in English, has no grammatical precedent whatsoever and therefore just sounds
wrong – this is the least common way I've seen used to actually try to work around this problem, but I have seen it before) or other completely unnatural-sounding linguistic contortions and hoop-jumping. None of it is even remotely ideal.
As mentioned before, there's quite a bit of discourse about all this, and while there are some conventions that took root (even if they aren't recognized as "correct" Hebrew) and some conventions that certain groups of people are trying to force into being a thing to replace the ones that did (with questionable degrees of success) – they're often only applicable to written Hebrew rather than spoken Hebrew, and end up creating something of a disconnect between the two.
That said, I do wonder if, over the course of years, some of these attempts will end up catching on more than they have so far – because
living languages are things that evolve through the people who use them – and it's fascinating to watch the process happen, even if the endless arguments between dinosaur-minded linguistic purists and people who try to beat the language into something it is not in service of good intentions are as exhausting as any other arguments between people with loud opinions on the internet are. This particular gendered mess is something I rather appreciate that modern English seems to have avoided altogether – even if, in the process, it managed to be profoundly messy in different ways... and even if there are people out there who still moan, bitch and whine about the existence of the singular "they" in English despite the fact that it has been in use before the singular "you" first became a thing – and you certainly don't see them lamenting the loss of "thou" and fiercely advocating that "you" should be reserved for plural use only. Why, it's almost like it is not even
remotely about the
language being used correctly! (... said the biomechanical abomination, immediately overloading the sarcasm meter).
... well,
that ended up being far longer than I expected. ^^;
), but I can also read and speak German at a basic level, courtesy of my mother who immigrated to the US from Germany and managed to make a little bit of it stick. I also used to be able to speak very basic Japanese when I lived in Japan, although alas, most of it has faded from disuse 
