I am looking for advice about how to go about memorising noun gender in languages where that information is not contained in the article preceding the noun.
In my case, the issue relates specifically to Welsh, although I'd be interested in the experiences of people learning other languages where you can't use the articles to learn gender. In Welsh, the definite article doesn't change according to noun gender, but feminine nouns can mutate following the definite article (assuming they start with a letter that mutates), or trigger mutations in adjectives or nouns that follow.
When I learned German, I eventually got in the habit of learning my nouns with der, die, or das, which, along with learning noun endings which generally indicate the gender of a noun, over time gave me a reasonable handle on noun gender.
I will make the point now of learning the noun endings in Welsh which generally indicate one gender or another, but does anyone have any tips to deal with the rest?
Learning noun gender without articles
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Re: Learning noun gender without articles
In Latin there's a convention to write "m.", "f." or "n." after nouns... People seem to largely remember gender straightforwardly though, without the need of a gender-marking article. Apis 'bee' is feminine but lapis 'stone' is masculine. It also helps that it's mostly just one subgroup of nouns (third declension nouns) that people need to be concerned about.
Ancient grammarians had a habit of writing hic, haec, hoc 'this' after nouns to indicate gender: apis haec 'this bee', lapis hic 'this stone', but no one these days seems to do that. You could do something similar with Welsh hwn, hon, hyn, I suppose.
Ancient grammarians had a habit of writing hic, haec, hoc 'this' after nouns to indicate gender: apis haec 'this bee', lapis hic 'this stone', but no one these days seems to do that. You could do something similar with Welsh hwn, hon, hyn, I suppose.
Last edited by Querneus on Wed Aug 11, 2021 11:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Learning noun gender without articles
Does Welsh inflect adjectives based on the gender? The Hindi textbook that I cut my teeth on always included an inflected adjective with every noun in vocabulary lists. In fact, I think ths method makes the gender more memorable than with an article because it feels just a little less arbitrary.
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Re: Learning noun gender without articles
I have to admit, I never make any great effort to learn gender, but I find with enough input, you just get a feel for it. Eventually the right gender just “feels” right and the wrong gender “feels” wrong.
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Re: Learning noun gender without articles
First study a grammar book to see whether there are some simple rules of thumb - and then only learn the simplest rules and their exceptions by heart, not all the words that comply with the rules. For instance in most languages there are more masculine nouns, so start out by assuming that any new word is masculine until proven wrong. Then look at the ending: I don't know about Welsh , but in all languages I know there are large clusters of words with certain endings associated with a specific gender - and then focus on learning the exceptions by heart. If the endings don't carry information about the gender then there may be some tricks that will solve the problems. For instance final vowels in Latin were reduced to weak or even silent e's already in Ancient French, but they survived in Spanish and Italian - so if you know the words there then you generally have the solution. The few 'false friends' have to be learnt by heart. There may also be clusters based on meaning, like for instance river or country names, but mostly with lots of exceptions which you have to learn by heart.
When you can't see any rules (or only rules that are too complicated to be practical) then you have to memorize things, and here you could use combinations of adjectives and substantives instead of relying on articles. Those combinations don't have to be fixed idiomatic combos (though fine if they are), the important thing is that you learn them and do repetitions using the same combinations. Or learn the words plus gender signs/letters. In my own wordlists I normally use graphical signs for space reasons. They function as letters (m,f,n), but stand more clearly out from the surrounding letters in the words. However there isn't an universally recognized sign for neuter. I use the sign "¤", but others might have other preferences - just stick to them once chosen. In my experience your memory will learn to remember the signs too when it becomes a habit to add them.
And as the last item of advice: don't get paralyzed if you don't remember the gender of a certain word. Outside of exams, few interlocutors would react to an occasional gender error. Even native speakers sometimes make them, and as a learner you aren't expected to be 100% foolproof. If a certain person is of the nitpicking type then maybe you shouldn't waste your precious time on that person. This includes the case where it's a teacher that can't see or hear an error without pointing it out. Use teachers/mentors to teach you useful rules of thumb and to weed out errors which you repeat all the time - and then do your exception learning away from the teacher.
When you can't see any rules (or only rules that are too complicated to be practical) then you have to memorize things, and here you could use combinations of adjectives and substantives instead of relying on articles. Those combinations don't have to be fixed idiomatic combos (though fine if they are), the important thing is that you learn them and do repetitions using the same combinations. Or learn the words plus gender signs/letters. In my own wordlists I normally use graphical signs for space reasons. They function as letters (m,f,n), but stand more clearly out from the surrounding letters in the words. However there isn't an universally recognized sign for neuter. I use the sign "¤", but others might have other preferences - just stick to them once chosen. In my experience your memory will learn to remember the signs too when it becomes a habit to add them.
And as the last item of advice: don't get paralyzed if you don't remember the gender of a certain word. Outside of exams, few interlocutors would react to an occasional gender error. Even native speakers sometimes make them, and as a learner you aren't expected to be 100% foolproof. If a certain person is of the nitpicking type then maybe you shouldn't waste your precious time on that person. This includes the case where it's a teacher that can't see or hear an error without pointing it out. Use teachers/mentors to teach you useful rules of thumb and to weed out errors which you repeat all the time - and then do your exception learning away from the teacher.
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Re: Learning noun gender without articles
When I first learned German at school, we were continually given lists of words to learn. I found remembering genders as harder than learning the words. Then I started vocab lists, writing all masculine nouns in black pen, neuter in red and feminine in blue. It worked.
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Re: Learning noun gender without articles
Iversen wrote:First study a grammar book to see whether there are some simple rules of thumb - and then only learn the simplest rules and their exceptions by heart, not all the words that comply with the rules. For instance in most languages there are more masculine nouns, so start out by assuming that any new word is masculine until proven wrong. Then look at the ending: ... in all languages I know there are large clusters of words with certain endings associated with a specific gender - and then focus on learning the exceptions by heart. If the endings don't carry information about the gender then there may be some tricks that will solve the problems. For instance final vowels in Latin were reduced to weak or even silent e's already in Ancient French, but they survived in Spanish and Italian - so if you know the words there then you generally have the solution. The few 'false friends' have to be learnt by heart. There may also be clusters based on meaning, like for instance river or country names, but mostly with lots of exceptions which you have to learn by heart.
Brilliant!
I've been aware that most grammar books do include the exceptions. You're "learn the simple rules and their exceptions by heart" gets right to the solution I've been missing. The exceptions are the grammar writer's attempt to help me - the one who likes things simple - understand by knowing the several common exceptions, the "simple rules" are more powerful and therefore more helpful.
The grammar publisher's should include a few of your helpful gems.
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Re: Learning noun gender without articles
gsbod wrote:I will make the point now of learning the noun endings in Welsh which generally indicate one gender or another, but does anyone have any tips to deal with the rest?
Just make them big or small, and use the mutation of the (attributive) adjective to tell you:
dyn mawr vs menyw fawr;
dyn bach vs menyw fach.
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