10/03/2020 How to Learn German Noun Gender – Is it ‘der’, ‘die’ or ‘das’?

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How to Learn German Noun Gender – Is it ‘der’, ‘die’ or ‘das’?

English is a language without grammatical gender, so the de nite article is always “the”. In Ge
however, we have three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine and neuter and it’s impor
remember the gender of the nouns, because it determines the article you’re going to use. Th
why I’ll show you some useful tips on how to remember the grammatical gender of German

1) Learn nouns with their genders

Treat the article of a noun as a part of the word. Don’t just learn Hund (dog), but der Hund (th
Like that you can memorize them together, making it easier to remember. It’s even better to
whole sentence:

Ich habe einen braunen Hund.

I have a brown dog.

Our brain doesn’t really like disconnected pieces of information. A meaningful context makes
much easier to remember, and there are additional bene ts. In the above mentioned senten
example you also learn and practice the accusative form of the inde nite masculine article (e
In addition, you learn a sentence that is relevant to you and you know that it’s correct, so in a
conversation you can use this sentence with con dence and this will make your German mor
uent.

2) Use a color-code system as visual help

I always say that when you learn a new word, it’s best to use as many senses as possible. Don
read the word, but also pronounce it, write it and hear it. The more senses you use, the bette
brain will retain the information. And if you use a color-code system, it will make it even easie
your brain to memorize the gender. But how do we do that? When you learn a new word:

– Write it down with a blue pen if it’s masculine, like “der Mann” (the man),

– Use a red pen for feminine nouns, like die Frau (the woman)

– Take a yellow pen for neuter nouns, like das Kind (the child).

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This color association helps later-on to recall the gender by just trying to remember what col
word was written in. I recently came across a website called genusly.com. It tells you the
grammatical gender of a German noun as you type it in a text box on their homepage. It colo
masculine nouns in blue, feminine nouns in red and neuter nouns in yellow.

The bene t is that it saves you time because it doesn’t interrupt your cognitive ow. You don
to look up words you’re not sure about the gender, but the website tells you immediately afte
writing the word. And as we just learned, the color visualization helps you learn and memoriz
German gender classi cation more easily. Check it out, it’s a really helpful tool.

And by the way, an interesting variation of this technique is having colored sheets of papers w
each color stands for a particular gender. So you could have blue paper and when you learn
masculine noun you write it there, red paper for feminine and yellow for neuter nouns.

3) Use a mnemonic memory technique

I’m a big fan of this kind of techniques and it really works when it comes to memorizing thing
couple of years ago I read a book about mnemonics and the goal of one of the exercises was
remember all 50 American states in their alphabetical order. I was skeptical, but went ahead
hours later I was indeed able to recite all 50 states from Alabama to Wyoming from memory.

The three main principles are association, imagination and location. You use your mind to cre
links and associations that will help you remember information. German has three noun gen
so you can choose for example

a male person and associate masculine objects with this person

a female person and associate feminine objects with this person
a neutral place to be associated with neuter objects.

Now you create a story. I chose my father to be the male person, my mother to be the female
person and my house to be the neutral place. Let’s start:

Mein Vater geht mit dem Hund in den Park.

My father goes with the dog to the park.

Er sitzt unter einem Baum und sieht einen See mit Fischen.

He sits under a tree and sees a lake with sh.

You can see that all the nouns in this story are masculine and they are associated with my fat
When you imagine and visualize this story, your brain will make the connection and later-on
remember the correct noun gender more easily. OK let’s create another story.

Meine Mutter geht in die Stadt.

My mother goes to the city.

Sie hat eine Blume in der einen Hand und eine Tasche in der anderen.

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She has a ower in one hand and a bag in the other.

All the nouns are feminine. And again, imagine the situation with colors and motions, the mo
interesting, strange or funny it is, the easier you will remember it. Our last story will take plac
house. It is associated with my neutral place and features only neuter nouns.

Im Haus sind viele Kinder.

In the house there are many children.

Sie sind in einem großen Zimmer mit vielen Fenstern und essen Eis. 

They are in a big room with many windows and eat ice-cream.

That’s how the technique works. It activates your vision and imagination and it puts things int
context which is tremendously helpful. You have the people do stu and put things in the ho
and then you watch that in your head like a movie, the possibilities are endless.

I’d like to encourage you to create your own association scenarios, because every mind is di
and your own associations are much better as they re ect the way in which your mind works
rst it might be di cult, but with a little practice you will soon become very familiar with the
technique and start having fun creating and developing these stories.

4) Identify the noun gender by word endings.

I won’t go into too much detail about this method, basically how it works is – you look at the w
ending of a noun (the so-called su x) and for example if it ends with –ling there is a good ch
that it’s masculine, if it ends with –ung it’s probably feminine and so on.

The problem is that there are many exceptions and I nd it easier to just learn the article tog
with the noun or use the association technique I mentioned before. Nevertheless, it does wo
some and that’s why I wanted to include it here.

Please click HERE for more tips like this

 by Ingo Depner in Tips & Tricks

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