DerDieDas.wtf: If you know the pain of learning the gender of nouns in German

Gendered nouns, both in French and German, have always been a problem for me. German came later but I recall at school that the beginning of each chapter of my French textbook had a list of nouns each preceded by its article and learning them was a pain. After school I'd sit on my bed bashing my head against the pages of the textbook whilst trying to learn these damn genders, they made no logical sense to me and rules for remembering them had so many exceptions that they were essentially useless. I hated learning them.

German was a whisker easier in that I was in German-speaking Austria when I was learning it so I was exposed to the nouns' usage on a daily basis. For me, the real gotchas in German were its damn declensions!

In my opinion, the only effective way to learn these genders is to be smothered in the language on a daily basis—this way, somehow, one learns them by a form of osmosis.

As already mentioned elsewhere, Appendix D - The Awful German Language in Mark Twain's The Tramp Abroad is a quintessential summing up of the difficulties a native English speaker has in learning German. It's a brilliant summary, not only is it hilariously funny but also he gives some excellent examples from different aspects of the language such as separable verbs, gendered and compound nouns and those damn German adjectives.

It's a while since I've read it so I can't remember chapter and verse but I'd thoroughly recommend anyone interested in the matter of German genered nouns read his bit on the 'sex' of fishwives and young girls. Appendix D also has some unforgettable comments on the length of German compound words—something to the effect that 'they stretch across the page like mountain ranges' and are long enough 'to have perspective.'

It's a must-read.

"Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl."

https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html

And yeah, it's the equivalent to English prepositions, it's just lots of history and no logic.

Every language is pretty much equally difficult if you want to gain near native fluency (even Esperanto). If you are aiming for quick business level fluency, English and Mandarin are easy due to the abundance of resources. Generally, however, sticking with your native language’s family is going to be easiest. I personally think that most of the English speaker trouble with German is that it is at once both familiar and frustratingly foreign due to the Romanization of English after the Norman conquest, while Spanish or Urdu is just foreign. The speaker carries no assumptions with himself/herself into the learning process.

However, the instructions remain hidden behind the browser address bar on my iPhone SE, so it took me a while to figure out what to do.

I thought tapping der / die / das at the bottom seemed like the most intuitive thing, rather than having to learn where to swipe.

Anyway, thank you!

There's a bunch of easy sound patterns that will make a German guess the right gender of a new word 99% of the time, like -er being masculine or -nis neuter. You can look them up, but it's much easier to form that intuition by learning vocab the right way.

Instead of counting each amount, should be counting right/wrong answers.

Plus more words...i don't know where but there must be a place with a list of common nouns.