"Okay. I diagrammed Je suis Marie." Her pronunciation is atrocious. "Suis is on my chart of verbs as the indicative present first person of suivre, which the dictionary translates as 'to follow'. Je is "I". Marie is just a name. So it's "I follow Marie"."

"Well, you're not wrong! But suis is also the indicative first person present of être, to be, and that meaning's much more common – so it's probably supposed to be 'I am Marie.'"  

" - why would two different words be spelled and pronounced the exact same???"

"You get that in English, too, any word in the dictionary that has multiple definitions. Like, uh, 'comb' the noun and 'comb' the verb."

"Does Javanese not have homophones?"

"Some but not ones that would fit into exactly the same kinds of sentences!"

"French is rude. Do the next one." 

"Je parle anglais means I parle English, which my chart says is the indicative first person present of Parler which means to speak, but for all I know it also means 'to murder', so probably it's either "I speak English" or "I murder Englishmen"."

"Which seams more likely on a - no actually that's a bad question in here. 'Speak' is right."

Julian thinks Annisa is trying to stall and he's not going to enable it. He might not be as much of a hardass as Naima, but he has his pride. "Next." 

"C'est un chat. C'est is the verb. The worksheet in class translated C'est as 'that is', which I'm relying on because it wasn't in the dictionary. un is 'a', if the thing that follows is male, and 'chat' is cat, so, that is a male cat."

"It could be any cat, 'chat' is a male noun."

Julian considers the advisability of trying to explain elisions in French and ultimately decides against it. 

"A male noun? ...even if it's a female cat?"

"Yeah it - oh this is your first gendered language. Sorry about the Romans."

Naima's going to take a few minutes to finish up her own homework, it's probably not actually effective for all three of them to be trying to help Annisa with her French homework at the same time.

"Gendered language? What do the Romans have to do with it?"

"Some languages assign a gender to every noun, even inanimate objects. Like Latin, and all the languages descended from Latin."

" - but that's stupid! And English doesn't do that."

"English isn't descended from Latin, it's Germanic – and it's weird for not having gender, actually, it used to but it lost it."  

"What does having gender mean, like, we have the concept on Java that there are male things and female things -"

"It's loosely connected to gender in that nouns that are always male or female will be masculine or feminine, but for most purposes it's kind of random and doesn't really mean anything. I apologize for the people who wrote this code."

"Great. Okay. So cats are...male? All of them? Including the girl ones?"

"Yes."

Annisa makes a new page in her notebook. Labels it "things that are MALE according to FRENCH".

Writes "CATS".