6d ago

How do you deal with learning gendered articles?

Wanted to ask for some tips since I'm really struggling with this trying to learn German.

I know there are certain ways to guess the gender (e.g. -er endings are usually masculine, -ung feminine and loan words neutral) but often times I'm just butchering the whole sentence by not knowing the correct articles.

Let me demonstrate my frustration: in many cultures the moon is considered "feminine", but in German it has masculine article!

Bitte, hüfe!

11 comments

I just learn them as part of the word itself. I'm learning via natural comprehension, so it just gives me a "feeling" when it's not right.
- So instead of learning a noun by itself you "attach" the article to the word? E.g. instead of Sonne you'd memorize DieSonne?
  Also would like to ask for tips on learning via natural comprehension! Been wondering whether listening to audio-only instead of watching videos helps with this?
  
  With the way I'm approaching learning, I never really learn words in isolation. I get exposed to new words as they are used in natural conversational language, which means I'm only exposed to the word with the gendered article that belongs to it, so I haven't had to try and explicitly remember which word is gendered which way.
  I'm learning Spanish, and there is a huge amount of natural comprehension content for Spanish out there. And once I got to a certain point, I was able to move on to (simple) native speaker content. Mostly TV and movies, with Spanish subtitles where possible

I have personally stopped worrying about it. I check genders often and try to learn it as a part of the word. I hope that through input and usage these things start to stick, but I believe that I am going to do mistakes for a long time. Likely forever.
- I tried this strategy as well, but now that I'm at a point where I can indeed communicate with natives I've sadly noticed that not knowing the correct article creates confusion and frustration in the listener when I try bit more advanced conversations.
  For my day-to-day interactions I can omit it, but this has kinda halted my learning :(

You just have to learn them with the word. Reading more can help as you will see the article in context and it may be easier for you to develop the association instead of learning the word in a vacuum.
- Yeah I've been reading "easy german" news to form a bit more association with the words. Guess there is no way around it, got to keep practicing!

11 comments