I’ve been having a very hard time remembering the genders even though the words aren’t so hard to remember, almost half of them are similar to English. Its like my brain is only hard wired to remember the noun but since English is my first language, the gender doesn’t seem to compute. To the Germans out there, how do you guys do it? There seems to be soooooooo many nouns, remembering the genders and the plurals seems like a daunting task.
This may not be the most scientific answer you’ll receive but say the first gender that comes to mind, it is more likely to be correct than not. The gender for sonne is ‘die’ sonne. So when your brain sees the word sonne a certain number of times it will forge a link between the two words. Thus when you just come out and say ‘the sun’, it will just feel right to say ‘die sonne’ and not ‘der sonne’ etc.
If purposely learning them, then learn the gender WITH the noun at the beginning.
As a native speaker you normally don’t have to care much about any rules concerning the gender of a noun, as you learn it automatically when you grow up. That means - even without knowing any rules (like e.g. those on this website: Genus (Geschlecht) bei deutschen Nomen ) - you always apply the correct gender without thinking about it (at least from a certain age). But, of course, there are other rules where lots of native speakers still make errors (I think it’s the same in all languages).
One phenomenon of our time is, that the genitive is often replaced by the dative. I 've got the impression, that less and less are applying the first one.
As a foreign language learner, I can surely understand your problem. Even in languages with only 2 different genders, I can’t always remember which one is the correct. When I started to learn Russian about 10 years ago, I was even overwhelmed by all the different endings (5 different cases for every noun) of the same word and so I stopped my studies 2 weeks later. But maybe - one day - I’ll dare to give it a retry.
When I learn a new noun in another language, I always compare the gender with the German one. If it is the same it’s fairly easy, if it is a different, I sometimes try to find a word in my language which has a relation to the other and which has the same gender as the foreign word.
Example: das Buch (n.) in French: le livre (m)
One German word which has a relation to “das Buch” but the same gender as in “le livre” in French is “der Buchstabe” (m) (relation: in almost every book you can find letters).
It’s easier for the brain to learn words or numbers if you have a connection to other things, events, memories etc.
I’m sure to native Germans, remembering the genders is totally instinctive, but as a German learner I find a good way of remembering them is by using a colour coded set I found in Anki. I don’t know if you use Anki but it’s a flashcard app for your PC or iPhone. Anyway there’s a set called just “German Vocabulary” and it has over 4000 words all colour coded:
pink - die
blue - der
grey - das
I really find associating the colour with the words helps me remember the gender!
You can download Anki for free from: http://ankisrs.net/
that sounds like an awesome idea, I wish I would have thought of it years ago.
Apart from that great suggestion, there are a few other ways of remembering the genders, here are a couple :
To recognise female words: " ‘The height of the kite’ is feminine", ie words ending in -heit, -keit are “die” words, as in
die Schönheit,
die Unberechenbarkeit,
die Fröhlichkeit,
die Traurigkeit
The ending “-ung” is feminine, as is -ät:
die Endung,
die Zeitung,
die Räumung,
die Pietät,
die Pubertät, etc.
For neuter words “All verbs used as subjects are neuter”.
Das Lesen, Singen, Spielen, Schreiben
Words ending in -eum, -tum, -al are generally neuter, as are -o words:
das Museum, das Lyceum, das Universum
das Herzogtum, das Eigentum,
das Kapital, das Futteral, das Hospital,
das Kino, das Lotto, das Bingo, etc.
Once upon a time the rule was that any foreign word entering the language would be treated as neuter, like “das Poster, das Cottage”. Things are changing though, you can see “die email” oder “das email”…
There are more of these type of ‘helpful hints’, but I can’t remember them at the moment. Perhaps someone else could add to this list?
By the way, once you’ve got the female and neuter words sorted, all remaining ones have to be male, don’t they?
Massive reading in German.
(It doesn’t solve the problem entirely - but it sure helps!)
Nice idea. I’ve asked several times for the possibility to classify words but there are only the tags. And I would love to add the basic word form to the LingQ. Now I put this into the hint. It is not the best solution but it helps me. But I cannot do reverse flash carding because with the basic form in the hint it is too simple.
There is a slight problem: I remember that there are some words with more than one gender. Sometimes more than one gender is possible escpecially for foreign words, and sometimes the word has different meanings with different genders. I’ve recognized this in French too.
@ Sanne: In my last post above, I’ve already inserted a link to a website where you can find some of those ending rules.
@ il_melomane It just goes to show, one ought to read all the posts in a thread! I’ll have a look at your link once I’ve got a little bit more time. Thanks for posting it. I often come across people asking for shortcuts…
Is that website only in German?
I reckon the trick is that native German speakers become subconsciously aware of the many rules and guidelines pertaining to gender, and this greatly eases the information load. A good source for learning what the rules are is Michigan University’s German pages (I used Predicting Noun Genders – Deutsch 101-326). If you want to drill them, I saw an app on reddit recently called German Grammar Spy that teaches them. (iPhone:https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/german-grammar-spy/id1323784437?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4; android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ie.jackkinsella.germanGrammarSpy)
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