German: any tips for learning gender?

[reineke]

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

"In terms of relative frequency, about 50% of German nouns are masculine, 30% feminine and 20% neuter (Bauch 1971, as cited in Hohlfeld, 2006)."

Grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisition: Relations between lexical and syntactic variability

[osoymar]

Along with the excellent advice to memorize gender along with the word, I have found that the most effective way of doing so is with an adjective rather than an article. Somehow “frischer Käse” is just more memorable than “der Käse.”