I work in education and if you think you're going to get a rise out of me by criticising out education system you can think again. I am chock full of criticisms of our education system. She didn't teach you because it wasn't considered part of formal English at the time, formal English being what you were taught at school. Your (outdated) knowledge of formal English applies to writing letters but you're trying to apply it to writing on a forum, where conversational English (i.e. the natural and living form) is in use. Singular they is neither modern, nor archaic in spoken English - it's just part of it.

It's pretty simple. She wouldn't have a reason to explicitly forbid something unless it's something people were prone to do (as they are and have always done). But as she didn't forbid it, this branch is redundant.

Yes indeed. No matter how you slice it "I wasn't taught to do it by my English teacher" is a weak defence. Your source of one English teacher in Germany doesn't exactly outweigh a lifetime of immersion.

Now that's interesting, as I was taught in school that Sie is also a formal way to address a single person in a formal manner (i.e. a polite "you"). Is my understanding wrong or did you omit it from explanation as a convenient way to ignore the point I was making? It is a plural being used as a singular pronoun. Does that seem familiar?

And you haven't addressed the elephant in the room, that being the fact that singular They is attested as far back as 1375. It is no modern butchering.

I accept your dislike, however your claim it is a "modern butchering" is BS as I have shown. You could accept that, but for whatever reason you prefer to stick your fingers in your ears and go "la la la" when confronted with facts. If that's how you wish to be seen, that's also your choice.

Just a supposition of mine extrapolated from the available evidence.

It's pretty amusing that you think it's even possible that English taught to you in school could be "everything the English language has to offer".
It's more the fact that it's provably been part of the language for hundreds of years and people still try and deny it. What reason might they have to ignore facts?
Well the reason their games aren't on their account is that they just opened a new account. Until they come back and provide some more info there's nothing anyone here can do.

Maybe the language and culture barrier is just a bit too overwhelming here.

I'd ask you all for a bit more excellence towards each other. :(

I don't really condone so harshly criticising the post of a German person just for using the male article as a default (which is more of a cultural thing in the gaming sphere). Just like with the nine fold strict order of adjectives in a sentence, we Germans have problems with the mere idea of not being able to apply a default grammatical gender to everything.

Fact:
The singular usage of the pronoun they has been around for nearly 650 years in the English language. It filled a huge grammatical gap that the German language filled with grammatical gender. In modern times, it effortlessly fills a new lexical gap that Germans struggle massively and as of yet fail to somehow overcome.

This should have settled the discussion three pages ago and nobody would have gotten (butt-)hurt.

If BreOl's former teacher has not taught her pupils the singular use of the word, it doesn't mean she actively told her pupils that a singular use was impossible. I seriously doubt she ever did, because how would she talk about situations in which the gender of a certain person is unknown?

In German, you'd likely use the female pronoun, because the grammatical gender of the word "Person" is female.

We recorded this masked person yesterday. They broke into an electronics shop.
RP or GenAm, this is how you'd properly talk about this situation in English.

Wir haben diese maskierte Person gestern aufgezeichnet. Sie ist in einen Elektronikladen eingebrochen.

That's how we'd put it in German, and we really don't think anything by it. We would still by default assume that it was a male person who broke into the store even though we just heard the news referring to them as a "she". That's our language. It's a box we're locked in, see: Sapir/Whorf hypothesis.

I envy the English language for that singular usage of they immensely. It's a giant leap for someone who grew up with a mother tongue that has grammatical gender.

I can talk to people in English about how my sibling told me in August last year that they don't have a gender. In German, I find it increasingly impossible to talk about my sibling. To even find a non gendered word for "sibling" is fairly impossible. I use "Geschwister" in the singular, it just sounds silly. I stumble and I still call them my sister accidentally, they're getting quite irate sometimes. And using brand new "just invented" gender neutral pronouns in a language you've spoken for more than 40 years, that's rock hard. My sibling has given us examples of what new pronouns they'd like to be used for them, and I do my fucking darndest to use them. They still sound like gibberish to my ears. I wish we'd have a singular they. We just don't.

Have a bit of patience, folks, please. This is difficult.

True indeed.

I'd left this thread of course as it went a bit mental (me included), but I'd like to make it clear if this was a thread in Deutsch then we could be having the opposite issue.

I'd like to think I'd at least defer to the native speaker if we were having this discussion auf Deutsch. ;)

Yarp!