How to remember gender of nouns

[tungemål]

Thanks for the replies so far!

To learn the gender with the noun - that is what I do. I memorize each new word as "der Käse", and not "Käse (m)", because that makes the article stick better.

The "problem" is, coming from Norwegian, there are so many words that I can passively understand without learning them. Nouns in Norwegian and German often have the same gender, but not always. I find that this doesn't help me much because the thought process becomes too complicated: I have to think "Brot - in norwegian brød - brødet - neuter - aha das Brot".

Thanks to tiia for writing out the guidelines. When I had German in school long ago we learned these rules. At that time it seem overwhelming to learn: a lot of rules and a lot of exceptions. But now, after having read a lot more German, I think they are helpful. I think after having had a lot of exposure to the language, it is helpful to go back to the rules to get an overview.

The linked thread from last year also has some good ideas. I think I will summarize in the first post the different approaches.

[tungemål]

I read somewhere, I don't remember where, about an interesting technique:
to associate the three genders with different characters. A variant is to associate genders with different colours.

[Heiopei]

Do like Russian, just leave article away!

French is my forst foreign language with gender, but I am familiar with it because German is my native language. I always learn the right article with the vocabulary and make sure mark myself wrong when I forget it. Learning sentences helps too because not only articles tell you the gender, but also du, au, ce/cette and so on. I guess for German it's more difficult because you need to know the case too and even then it's not always determinable. (^^ゞ

[Cèid Donn]

My very first "second" language was German, followed by French, followed by Latin. That was my "early days" of language learning when I was still in school/college and was young, stupid and gullible enough to faithfully try to do things the way other people said I needed to do them. I tried a lot approaches to help me remember gender. In my vast assortment of old notebooks from years past, there are pages and pages and pages of lists, hand-made quizzes, noun groupings, nouns highlighted in rainbows of colors, and other foolish attempts at making it easier for me to remember gender. And after all that, I have to say only one approach has ever really worked for me: exposure plus repetition in context. In other words: reading, listening, reading, writing, reading, shadowing, reading, dictation, reading. Also reading.

About a decade ago I took my first Gaelic class. My teacher was a speaker who has learned Gaelic as a kid, stopped using it, and in his later years picked it up again. He said he never tried to learn gender, only short phrases from using the words in context. Rather than remember that bùth is feminine, for example, he'd just remember you'd say "Tha a' bhùth dùinte" and not "Tha am bùth dùinte," and extract from that what patterns to follow regarding dative and genitive forms. That made a lot of sense to me then, and it continues to make more and more sense to me in the years since. So in recent years, I mainly learn grammatical gender directly from the context of actually using the language, and language learning is a much, much happier endeavor for me because of it.

Now, if I had to go back to class and prepare for a test that was going to test me on noun gender, would I go back to drilling lists into the late night hours? Yeah, sure. But if you don't have pass a test, why do that to yourself? You're only have so much time in this life. Just go use the language and learn the fussy details along the way.

[Sayonaroo]

Reading and listening a lot will fix that problem. Reading and listening a lot fixes a lot of problems in general. Like if I always hear la mano in Spanish songs and I never hear anyone say el mano (unless I'm watching some video by a spanish language learner who isn't fluent in Spanish which is something I don't do), I'll know just from sheer repetition that it's an exception to the rule that most words that end in -o are masculine. I don't know about german with the 3 genders but for other languages like Spanish/french with 2 genders it seems doable. Other than sheer exposure to the language, you can look into general rules for the gender of the words.

[Iversen]

How to remember gender in French: learn Italian and/or Spanish - haha.

There are actually a few cases where a word has different genders in these three languages, but if a word ends in -a in Italian (which mostly is the sign of feminine gender, except some job titles) then your best bet is that it also is feminine in French.

In German: no such rule. Here you need to memorize a few rules, like for instance that most word ending in -e are feminine. And then you just have to learn the exceptions. Actually this is one instance of a general rule's rule: if you know the most common gender for a certain type of words then it doesn't serve any puprose to memorize their gender - focus on those that don't follow the rule.

The law of diminishing returns also functions here: if maybe five or six rules cover 90% percent of the substantives in a language then it may not be worth learning (and applying!) 10 rules more to push that to 95%. At some point it simply is necessary to learn genders word by word, using whatever method you prefer.

[Querneus]

How to remember gender in French: learn Italian and/or Spanish - haha.

I have definitely heard from people who studied French first that gender became a lot easier once they started learning Italian or Spanish.

There are actually a few cases where a word has different genders in these three languages, but if a word ends in -a in Italian (which mostly is the sign of feminine gender, except some job titles) then your best bet is that it also is feminine in French.

I would like to mention a post I made here a couple years ago about those words with different gender in Spanish and French, for those who may have missed it:
https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=7137&p=87621#p87621

Funny how it's been two years and I still haven't gotten around improving the last section, especially the area of occupations, where the topic gets quite interesting and complex, involving differences between Quebec and European French (Quebec la docteure vs. European Madame le docteur, just in terms of what is common) and varied usage in Spanish across all populations that needs to be studied word by word at times for the word endings (common la médico vs. very uncommon la médica, common la abogado and equally common la abogada, common la jueza vs. the rather legalistic la juez...).

[tungemål]

Associative techniques.

I think the problem with remembering the gender and the article is that it is very abstract, and the brain automatically sort out information about whether to use der, die or das because it is redundant information (and the brain is smart and understand it is unnecessary). To be able to remember it, some associative techniques could be helpful. Techniques for making something more meaningful, vivid and interesting makes us remember.

Inspired by how I perceive the gender quality of nouns in my native language, I have tried to associate german genders with different colours: "das" is black, "der" is blue, and "die" is white. You could also associate it with any character, or anything that you feel makes sense. That is, when I learn a noun I try to think of the colour. I am not sure if it is a good idea with the colour in some instances like "der käse" because I naturally imagine a yellow colour for cheese.

I read somewhere, I don't remember where, about an interesting technique:
to associate the three genders with different characters. A variant is to associate genders with different colours.

[tungemål]

Updated with a summary!

And to add one point: Maybe we have to just accept some grammatical gender mistakes. As tiia points out, gender mistakes are very common even at advanced stages. I also notice this in my own language: A foreigner can speak impeccable Norwegian (they are usually from Germany or the Netherlands), but sooner or later they will make a gender mistake, and that will immediately label them as a non-native speaker. However, understanding is never problematic because of this.

[AnthonyLauder]

Many years ago, a friend told me of a very novel way to remember genders. I never tried it, but he swore it was very effective. He was learning a language with two genders, and created lists of masculine words, which he studied in the sauna, and lists of feminine words whcih he studied in a cold bath. He claimed that later on whenever he thought of a word, his body would either give him a nice warm feeling or a cold chill immediately, which gave him the gender immediately.