I once tried to learn Korean on Duolingo. I didn't persist because I found it very difficult to memorize Hangul (the Korean alphabet). Later, I tried Italian because of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, which have become very popular among young women in China since being translated into Chinese. The TV adaptation has also been widely discussed. I bought the first book in the series, My Brilliant Friend, at a bookstore in Kuala Lumpur. Although it's available online in China, I decided to buy it there as a souvenir. Anyway, Italian sounds great, but the verb conjugations and pronunciation are too difficult for me, at least for now.

After that, I realized that conjugations are very common in European languages. Although I already knew about conjugations in Japanese, I still find it hard to learn any language that has them. Out of curiosity about the German language itself and its writers, such as Trakl, I began learning German by myself as a hobby about a year ago. Sometimes I find German pronunciation a little easier to learn compared to English. I like that German, like Chinese, can form words by simply combining them, whereas English requires mastering numerous roots. German might be the last language I learn, given that I haven't yet mastered English or Japanese very well. Also, I haven't had much time to learn it—I'm still stuck at the stage of learning pronunciation and memorizing the gender and plural forms of nouns, both of which are very difficult for a Chinese speaker.

I learned that there is grammatical gender in Russian when I was reading The Unwomanly Face of War. It is said that some branches of the military acquired feminine nouns in Russian because of those brave female soldiers. Here is an interesting difference. In languages that have grammatical gender, the emergence of feminine job titles signifies a step further toward gender equality. We have been there too. We used to add ‘女’(female/woman) before someone's job title to emphasize that she is brilliant. However, in recent years, we have been trying to remove the gender marker from job titles. After all, if gender equality is truly real, then no one need to emphasize gender when referring to a title.

One example of gender in Chinese is the translation of Virginia Woolf's name. Her family name used to be translated as '伍尔芙', and the character '芙' is commonly used in girls' names. Some people objected to this, arguing that foreign family names should not be translated by using characters that imply gender. As a result, 'Woolf' is now translated as '伍尔夫' in some versions. However, this still cannot satisfy everyone, because '夫' also implies gender—its basic meanings are 'husband' and 'male'. So, this has become a problem that is difficult to please everyone.

Another example is the translation of 'Monroe'. It can be translated as '梦露' in Marilyn Monroe or '门罗' in James Monroe. Although these two words mean nothing more than transliterations, this reflects a tendency to emphasize gender. Because Marilyn Monroe has always been seen as a sexy actress, she got a beautiful translation of her family name—'梦' means 'dream' and '露' means 'dew'—which is quite unfair to her, since she was an excellent person, not just a symbol of sexiness. By the way, Alice Munro's family name is also translated as '门罗', the same as James Monroe's, and this is because 'Munro' and 'Monroe' sound similar. In a word, gender is everywhere in languages, even in a language like Chinese without grammatical gender.

By the way, when My Brilliant Friend was published in China, some people were confused about the title '我的天才女友'—which means 'My Genius Girlfriend'. This title perplexed people: who is the genius girlfriend? Some even thought the book was about a lesbian couple. Although the word '女友(girlfriend)' could mean either 'someone's girlfriend' or 'a female friend' decades ago, people now tend to use it only to mean 'someone's girlfriend'. Therefore, the title has been explained many times to help people accept and understand it.