Very interesting article with a very stupid title. Of course you can, everyone who has ever lived immersed in a different language knows that.
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That’s just the QuoraBot deciding to try its hand at proving Hofstadter’s point in Le Ton Beau de Marot. (That being: translation is hard.)
My favourite example of “translation is hard” is this:
WTAF?
The original text was French.
Arbre, Ballon, Cheval, Dauphin, Etoile, Fleur, Gateau, Hélice, Image, Jus, Kangourou, Lion, Maison, Neige, Oiseau, Poisson, Queue, Roue, Singe, Tigre, Universe, Vache, Wagon, Xylophon, Yacht, Zèbre
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Makes perfect sense. arbre, ballon, cheval, dauphin, etoile, fleur, gateau, …
Nice of them to provide English translations too. 
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A discussion group participant asked everyone how we should say “vegan cheese” in French. After getting various answers, she told us the best response she’s heard is «fauxmage.»
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“…the man who wrote the note is a German. Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence – ‘This account of you we have from all quarters received.’ A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs.”
– Sherlock Holmes, A Scandal in Bohemia
Typing as a former high school German I student who spent much time wrestling with German irregular verbs, more power to you, I say! Be as rude to those verbs as you wanna!
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RobWords is XLNT.
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after taking my required 2 credits of foreign language in high school (French, in my case,) it really opened my eyes to how weird English is (and also how weird gendering nouns is – why the hell is it so ancient and popular elsewhere?)
the bit I’ve been thinking about lately is using prepositions with verbs, but until I watched this video, I didn’t even realize the scope of it, I was only thinking of individual prepositions. we use “up” in a variety of ways which are inconsistent with the others. “look up” or “cheer up,” etc.
but what I personally found interesting is that as a native speaker, you can still be baffled by this because some of them are regional. I’m not sure if this has been normalized yet – “y’all” is now starting to be spoken by non-native US southerners – but as a young Michigander transplanted to Tennessee, I had never heard anyone say “put up” to mean “put away.” so within a few days of moving to Nashville, I’m in Mrs. Bivins’ classroom reading a novel during class and she asks me to “put that up.” I start looking around the room for shelving I hadn’t noticed before. there are no shelves.
of course, this is an expression I personally use all the time nowadays.
even grammar itself can be regional. in the south, we use “modal stacking” for modal verbs, which is not done elsewhere.
“can you go to the store for me?”
“well, I might could, depending on if I have time.”
it sounds ignorant, but when you weigh it against the “correct” grammar of “I might be able to,” it’s nice to ditch all the extra words.
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I was grumbling about this in high school: “What problem, exactly, is solved by changing the article depending whether a table is male or female?” A Chinese friend replied: “That reminds me: What problem to articles solve? I’ve been meaning to ask.”
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Love it.
English speakers are all using around a dozen vowel sounds, whereas speakers of other languages … average out at 5 or 6.
Thai has entered the chat, 32 vowels in tow.
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I’m a CA native and say this all the time, much to my husband’s amusement.
He always puts the object in his hand and raises his arm, and ask, “Up where?” But I’m from an area in CA that has a lot of Southern US linguistic influence. 
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Neat. I didn’t know “put up” was a thing for any modern English speakers. I was only familiar with it in Elizabethan English:
Antonio. Put up your sword. If this young gentleman
Have done offence, I take the fault on me:
If you offend him, I for him defy you.
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Articles indicate to the listener whether you’re talking about the same one as before or bringing up a new one.
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And to be fair, my French and German teachers pointed out that with gendered nouns, there is a lot less chance for ambiguity around homophones / homoglyphs.
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True enough, but they also introduce their own confusion.
Bring a French-as-a-second-language learner, I can say with some confidence that using the wrong gender on a non-homophone can confuse the sh*t out of native French speakers.
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La livre = “the pound”
Le livre = “the book”
Ce n’est pas du tout confusant.
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ganz einfach!
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As a counter example that using the wrong article is confusing to native speakers, I’d like to use
Das Schild = the sign
Der Schild = the shield
Because the latter is so uncommonly used these days, most Germans get it wrong and use das Schild for both, yet I have never encountered a situation where it was ambiguous even when used wrongly.
Similarly, I don’t think someone learning German using the wrong gender is confusing to listen to. To me, it’s similar to listening to someone learning English being insecure about when to use a definite article. It sounds strange but information is not lost in most cases. I’m going to store to pick up the coffee is totally understandable.
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YMMV 
That is usually the case, but I’ve been in France a long time, and I’ve occasionally seen wrong articles cause marked confusion (in contexts simple enough that I can be sure I haven’t accidentally asked if my rental car comes with a buffalo…)
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I recall hearing that the original grammatical gender system in proto-Indo-European was probably animate-inanimate, which would have made it pretty obvious which form to use for any given word. Later, the animate got split into masculine and feminine, which would still be mostly straightforward. But then things got blurry - people started using masculine and feminine forms for inanimate objects, sometimes in the process entirely dropping the inanimate/neuter gender from the grammar, so in modern languages we have fragments of ancient grammatical rules with their original logic replaced by arbitrary conventions.
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