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12:07
April 29, 2012
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I'm a native English speaker trying to learn German while living in Germany.
I've found it very difficult to remember noun gender--it's probably been my biggest problem so far in learning the language. English doesn't have gender, but I've noticed that the French and Italian students have this problem as well.
Are there any memorization techniques people have found helpful for this?
04:48
June 29, 2011
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First of all, I'm going to say that it's not really that critical; if you mess up the gender everyone will still understand you and almost no one will care. So my advice would be not to prioritize this in particular (i.e. in my opinion pretty much everything else is MORE important than getting the gender right: increasing your vocab, improving your accent, understanding the cases, etc.)
There are some patterns to the genders, for example that all (or "most") nouns with a certain ending have the same gender, like for example all nouns ending in "-keit" are female. The patterns are explained here:
http://german.about.com/library/blgen_der.htm
http://german.about.com/library/blgen_die.htm
http://german.about.com/library/blgen_das.htm
But some are just random, and some don't follow the pattern even though they have a certain word ending, so you just have to learn them as you go. Something like 55% of all nouns are masculine so when in doubt, guess "der" 
The pages I linked to try to convince you that the #1 most important thing is to always learn the gender at the same time you learn the noun. That's a load of BS; it's really much too difficult and not that important (compared to other aspects of the language that you could be spending that time and effort on).
This would be my advice regarding memorizing noun genders:
- memorize the ones with patterns
- memorize the articles for words that come up really, really often but don't fit the pattern (off the top of my head, a few useful ones are: das Wasser, die Gabel, das Messer, der Käse, der Name)
- guess "der" for all the rest (you can look them up when you're at a more advanced stage and don't have so much to learn at once)
I hope that helps… I'm also a Canadian native English speaker who learned German in Germany. If you need any help let me know
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05:13
April 29, 2012
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Thanks, those sites will be very helpful.
What sucks is that my professors here at the German Uni put questions on the exam questions where you're supposed to know how gender corresponds with declension or adjective or whatever--and, when you don't know the gender of the noun in the exercise, you can't really show that you know how it works. Maybe they'll give us some grace on that since EVERYONE's messing up gender in our class.
But after this crazy past 20 something hours of cramming for the A2-2 test I'm taking in two hours, it's not like there's anything I can do.
On occasion I fake a slight Italian accent and just put a slight "a" sound at the end of everything. It at least gets around people answering you in English.
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