Hey listen, this has nothing to do with the gender of people and everything to do with the gender of nouns.
Genderizer is a Chrome extension that helps advanced language learners build stronger associations between nouns and their gender by color-coding them in the browser. It currently offers German and Spanish language support, and the colors are fully customizable to your preference and accessibility needs.
Genderizer is totes available in the Chrome Web Store now, go download it!
If you want to hack on it locally:
- Download or clone this repo using the green Code button at the top of this page
- Put your Chrome extensions in developer mode using the toggle at the upper right of the extensions page
- Click on "Load unpacked" and point it at the directory where you put the Genderizer repo
When Genderizer is on, it auto-detects the language of each page as it loads and will colorize if the text contains one of the languages Genderizer currently supports.
You can control Genderizer's behavior by clicking its icon in your browser. In this menu, you can toggle Genderizer on and off and select custom colors. Clicking Save will reload your current tab and re-colorize using your new selections, while Reset will restore the original default colors. Your colors will persist across tabs and browser sessions.
Genderizer relies on a list of words for each language. The lists are pretty big, but they don't contain every possible noun (especially in German, where compound nouns are extremely common). For the moment, if the word isn't in the list, it won't get colorized.
Please open an issue!
Regardless of how we personally feel about cultural gender/color associations, they are pre-existing associations that we don't need to work to acquire. Building the grammatical gender associations on top of existing color cues is more likely to be helpful quickly than simultaneously building new associations between nouns and gender and color.
That's a long way of saying: if the default colors aren't meaningful or helpful to you, pick new ones that are! The less work your brain has to do to tie together color and gender, the better.
Genderizer can easily be extended to support other languages that make use of any or all of feminine, masculine, neuter, and ambiguous grammatical gender -- all it takes is a word list! A word list should be a json object containing key-value pairs of nouns and their genders. I do not recommend attempting to manually compile a word list (unless your language has a very small vocabulary). Take a peek at the dictionaries in the lexicon directory to see what a word list looks like.
I created Genderizer during my time at the Recurse Center, a retreat for programmers. Thanks to @pius, @rolandcrosby, and @JohnEarnest for the assists, and huge credit to @lbernick for adding Spanish language support.
The German lexicon contains data extracted from languagetool-org/german-pos-dict under CC-BY-SA-4.0.