i'm curious if german speakers use the masculine words for professions/people as neutral like english does, or if it feels weird to do that. (i'm not explaining this correctly, but if i say in english "Kate Winslet is a great actor", it doesn't feel incorrect, bc even though actor has a feminine equivalent (actress), actor has shifted to being neutral.) i imagine it would be a bit different bc german has grammatical gender and english doesn't.
(I know people use -er*innen to include both men and women without having to write the same word twice, but i've never seen a singular equivalent to that)
also is there a german newspaper that you like? i'd like to improve my vocab and i've found newspapers are interesting enough to hold my attention but shorter and less complicated than actual books.
*sigh* it's a Whole Thing and debate that's been going on for decades, so here's a short history lesson:
We have this concept of "Generisches Maskulinum" (generic masculine) which claims that if you speak about a mixed group of people, e.g. "Schauspieler" (actors) in the masculine form, it means both men and women.
However, studies show that if you present people with generic masculine job titles etc., a lot of people automatically assume that it's specifically about men, and thus women are often not thought about.
Starting in the 1970s, feminists advocated to change that. Instead of using the generic masculine, people started to use both the masculine and feminine when talking about mixed groups, e.g. "Schauspielerinnen und Schauspieler".
Since this is pretty long and can be annoying to type, shorter forms like "Schauspieler/innen" and "SchauspielerInnen" were also created.
These are very common and normalized now.
In 2003, people in Queer Theory wanted to come up with a new variant that explicitly includes non-binary people. There are different variants, like "Schauspieler_innen", "Schauspieler*innen", "Schauspieler:innen".
"Schauspieler*innen" has emerged as the most popular spelling.
This variant is very popular in queer and leftist circles, but heavily criticized by conservative people.
In singular, when referring to a specific person, you always use the form that corresponds to the persons gender. So, "Kate Winslet ist eine tolle Schauspielerin" is correct. "Kate Winslet ist ein toller Schauspieler" sounds like Kate Winslet is a man.
You could make up a scenario where you need a gender neutral singular, e.g. when you are looking for a singular actor of any gender for some reason. Maybe you need an actor who speaks Chinese, and their gender is not important for the role. Then you could say "Ich brauche eine/n Schauspieler/in, der/die chinesisch spricht" ("I need an actor who speaks Chinese"). But scenarios like these just aren't as common.
For a newspaper, if you are looking for something that's online and free, I suggest t-online.de. I like them because their reporting is fairly neutral politically, and their articles should be easy enough to understand for learners.
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