German: any tips for learning gender?

[dampingwire]

That's a good point. Personally I don't like "Hund m" as it just seems unnatural, but I completely get your point.

Yeah, I don't have an ideal solution for this.

My current solution for this is to not yet to have come across the dative. I expect it's not a long term solution

[Kat]

I agree with the others, it helps if you view the gender as an intrinsic part of the word you learn, not as an add-on.

If you are a visual learner, you could try color-coding.
For example, you could type the English word in black and the German equivalent in different colors depending on the gender -- let's say all feminine nouns in red, all masculine nouns in blue, and all neuter nouns in green.

You'd need use a different program though, one that lets you use different colors.

The good news is that it should get easier.
Once you move beyond the basic vocabulary there are fewer exceptions to those rules you mentioned. Abstract nouns tend to stick to them more closely because they are often loanwords derived from Latin, Greek, French etc.

[Iversen]

If you had time to notice the gender in situations where it is obvious and remember it forever then the problem would be solved. And in the long run and after a lifetime of repetitions the genders for each word may stick. But for those who don't have that much time the obvious strategy would be to learn some of the rules of thumb and then only do an effort to memorize the gender of substantives that don't follow those rules.

For instance most substantives ending in -e are feminine, so spend your energy on those that aren't feminine. And most of the substantives ending on a consonant are masculine, so focus your energy on those that aren't. If you systematically look for representatives of the smaller category if there is a choice then the size of the task becomes much less intimidating.

Exceptions are of course by definition representatives of a very small category, but you can only spot them if you already have learnt to apply a number of rules of thumb.

[rfnsoares]

I'm not studying German anymore, but when I was learning German I always learned the noun with the article.

Here is an article from Italki. It might be helpful.

https://www.italki.com/article/715/How- ... les-Battle

[CarlyD]

Thank you everyone for all your suggestions. I like the one about staying away from Dative

When I initially learn the words, I'm absolutely learning it as "der Hund" and not just Hund. My problem as I gain more and more vocabulary is that when I want to recall the word, the noun will pop into my head, and I'm struggling for the correct article.

I know that time, in part, will solve a lot of it. Words I learned early on--Hund, Haus, Zimmer, etc.--are absolutely ingrained with the correct gender. But I've been hearing them for 2 years. I'm hoping to get the gender ingrained on the newer words faster than that.

I'm going to go back through my grammar books and make sure that I've got all the rules on my cheatsheet--maybe I've missed some rare ones that would help.

Some guy put out a book--don't recall the name of it now--and actually said not to bother about gender and just use "die" for every noun. I hope no one else learning takes his advice.

[patrickwilken]

But for those who don't have that much time the obvious strategy would be to learn some of the rules of thumb and then only do an effort to memorize the gender of substantives that don't follow those rules.

This sort of strategy doesn't work for me in German. I find the rules helpful for memorizing new words (e.g., another masculine large animal; another feminine word starting with 'e'; another foreign word in the neuter). Knowing that a word follows the 'regular' rules helps me remember the gender quite quickly, but I still have to memorize it or when I am confronted with it later I will be wondering if it is regular or not.

I guess it's helpful to know that according to Duden 46% of German words are Feminine, 34% masculine, and 20% neutral. So as a first rule of thumb assume any word you see is feminine, and if it's not feminine it's probably masculine. Knowing this plus following the basic rules will get you quite far.

https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/Die-Verteilung-der-Artikel-Genusangabe-im-Rechtschreibduden

Also good news: Joghurt can take any of the three genders.

[Jaleel10]

Some guy put out a book--don't recall the name of it now--and actually said not to bother about gender and just use "die" for every noun. I hope no one else learning takes his advice.

[CarlyD]

Bumping this because I found another book on Amazon last night.

Because the answer to every question is always another book.

Der, Die, Das; The Secrets of German Gender, by Constantin Vayenas. Amazon has the "look inside" option and it looks like one of those book that you can just sit and read forever, rather than an actual textbook type. I was looking at the page that talked about the gender of shapes--how things that are circular would be this gender and things that are rectangular would be that gender.

If anyone is interested, here's the link to the book at Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/39524 ... UTF8&psc=1

[WildGinger10]

when you are learning words via Anki (you are doing that right?) just make sure that you always learn the gender with it, and learn something like "Der Hund" not "Hund (masc)" which is too far removed from the language.

This was going to be my advice as well. Learn the gendered article with the word, as an intrinsic part of the word. That way it's never "Hund... what gender is that again??" and instead it's always "Der Hund... well der is masculine so it's masculine." The article and the noun are intrinsically linked in your brain as the same word.

There are also basic rules in German (with exceptions, of course) for word genders, eg. most nouns ending in -e are feminine (the big exception being "der Käse") and most nouns ending in -chen are neuter (hence, "das Mädchen" even though a Mädchen is literally a female child the word is neuter because it ends in -chen), etc. But these are "grammar rules" and eventually they need to be internalized. The best way to do that, in my experience, is to learn it with the noun as part of the same word.

[Iversen]

Knowing that a word follows the 'regular' rules helps me remember the gender quite quickly, but I still have to memorize it or when I am confronted with it later I will be wondering if it is regular or not.

That's actually not what I wrote. I suggested that you spend extra time and effort on learning the exceptions with their gender (using whatever technique you prefer) - NOT learning long lists of words that are exceptions to some rule. The words that are in the majority according to that rule don't need nearly as much attention.

Knowing the rules is only relevant with totally new words or words whose gender you never have learned, and it's in the memorization phase it is practical to know whether a certain word is an exception or not to a certain rule of thumb (and keep the number of memorized rules down to a minimum). When you are in the middle of a long discussion you don't have time to recall the rule itself or a long list of exceptions - the necessary knowledge must at that point be embedded in each individual word.