How can I learn noun genders better?

Question

One of the things that I really liked about German, as I was studying it in college was the very orderly grammar, which actually helped me to understand my native English better.

As a non-native speaker, one of the hardest things for me to do is remember the correct noun genders. When I speak German, I am intelligible, but I'm sure it sounds to a native speak much as English as a second language sounds to me.

Are there tips and tricks to learning genders? Are there patterns that I might not be aware of that will save me from brute force memorization?

Answer 1

One obvious way (still worth pointing out) is always learning vocabulary with the "der, die, das" prefix.

If you memorize

Der Hund
Die Rose
Das Haus

instead of

Hund
Rose
Haus

you learn the gender automatically along the way — not unlike Latin (Rosa, Rosae, Rosam).

Answer 2

I'd like to add a more complete answer:

It's not the actual person, place or thing that has gender in German, but the WORD that stands for the actual thing. That's why a “car” can be either "das Auto" (neut.) or "der Wagen" (masc.).

After searching about noun genders, from here:

• Always MASCULINE (der/ein):

  Days, months, and seasons: Montag, Juli, Sommer (Monday, July, summer). The one exception is das Frühjahr, another word for der Frühling, spring.

  Points of the compass, map locations and winds: Nordwest(en) (northwest), Süd(en) (south), der Föhn (warm wind out of the Alps), der Scirocco (sirocco, a hot desert wind).

  Precipitation: Regen, Schnee, Nebel (rain, snow, fog/mist)

  Names of cars and trains: der VW, der ICE, der Mercedes. (But motorbikes and aircraft are feminine.)

  Words ending in -ismus: Journalismus, Kommunismus, Synchronismus (equal -ism words in English)

  Words ending in -ner: Rentner, Schaffner, Zentner, Zöllner (pensioner, [train] conductor, hundred-weight, customs collector). The feminine form adds -in (die Rentnerin).

  The basic "atmospheric" elements that end in -stoff: der Sauerstoff (oxygen), der Stickstoff (nitrogen), der Wasserstoff (hydrogen), plus carbon (der Kohlenstoff). The only other elements (out of 112) that are masculine are der Phosphor and der Schwefel (sulphur). Note: All of the other chemical elements are neuter (das Aluminium, Blei, Kupfer, Uran, Zink, usw.).

• Always FEMININE (die/eine):

  Nouns ending in the following suffixes: -heit, -keit, -tät, -ung, -schaft - Examples: die Freiheit, Schnelligkeit, Universität, Zeitung, Freundschaft (freedom, quickness, university, newspaper, friendship).

  Nouns ending in -ie: Drogerie, Geographie, Komödie, Industrie, Ironie (often equal to words ending in -y in English)

  Names of aircraft, ships and motorbikes: die Boeing 747, die Titanic, die BMW (motorbike only; the car is der BMW). The die comes from die Maschine, which can mean plane, motorbike and engine. - Helpful reminder: Ships are often referred to as "she" in English.

  Nouns ending in -ik: die Grammatik, Grafik, Klinik, Musik, Panik, Physik - But see German Noun Suffixes and Gender for some exceptions!

  Borrowed (foreign) nouns ending in: -ade, -age, -anz, -enz, -ette, -ine, -ion, -tur: Parade, Blamage (shame), Bilanz, Distanz, Frequenz, Serviette (napkin), Limonade, Nation, Konjunktur (economic trend). Note: Such words often resemble their English equivalent. A rare -ade exception: der Nomade. Cardinal numbers: eine Eins, eine Drei (a one, a three)

• Always NEUTER (das/ein):

  Nouns ending in -chen or -lein: Fräulein, Häuschen, Kaninchen, Mädchen (unmarried woman, cottage, rabbit, girl/maiden)

  Infinitives used as nouns (gerunds): das Essen, das Schreiben (eating/food, writing)

  Almost all of the 112 known chemical elements (das Aluminium, Blei, Kupfer, Uran, Zink, Zinn, Zirkonium, usw.) - except for six that are masculine: der Kohlenstoff (carbon), der Sauerstoff (oxygen), der Stickstoff (nitrogen), der Wasserstoff (hydrogen), der Phosphor and der Schwefel (sulphur). Note: Most of the elements end in -ium, a das ending.

  Names of hotels, cafés and theaters: Das Ritz, Das Starbucks and Das Hilton

  Names of colors used as nouns: das Blau, das Rot (blue, red)

  the letters: das A, das B, etc.

Answer 3

Generally I think we have to just learn them, but here are some patterns I've been told:

• Word ends with "a" -> feminine (die Sauna)
• Word ends with "e" -> feminine (die Tasche, die Küche)
• Word ends with "ung" -> feminine (die Entscheidung)
• Word ends with "chen" -> neutral (das Mädchen, das Märchen)
• Word comes from a foreign language -> neutral (das Hotel, das Restaurant)
  Though I feel that rule doesn't always work so well (der Computer?)

Not related to genders, but also one rule I like:

• Word ends with "er" -> plural form also ends with "er" (ein Rechner, zwei Rechner)

Answer 4

It really is learning-by-heart, for the most part. There is no clean method to guess your way though, and no reliable pattern to learn.

There is one simple rule though to determine the gender of a composite noun - it always has the gender of the last noun in the composition

der Donaudampschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän
--------------------------------------^^^^^^^ der …Kapitän

Sometimes you can make an educated guess. Nouns that describe "traditionally" male things (like being the captain of a ship) very likely also have a male gender. This works very well with nouns for professions - der Schmied (blacksmith), der Bäcker (baker), der Fahrer (driver). You could extend that to "male" traits like boldness, aggressiveness, bravery, which would explain why it is der Löwe (lion) or der Hirsch (deer).

Words that end in "…mann" are also very easy ;) - both for obvious reasons and as per the rule for composite nouns explained above.

But already with neuter/female it's not that simple, since it's die Frau (woman, female) but das Mädchen (girl, neuter!) but die Schaufel (shovel, female again!).

Answer 5

As the others have said, at the end of the day, you really just have to memorize them. I found a little list of generalizations regarding regular, genitive, and plural noun endings and their associated genders, but I stress that they are no more than generalizations. That does not mean that there are no exceptions!

I'll go ahead and copy them below, but it's easier to read at the source. Hope it helps. :)

• Masculine -ant, -en, -en; -ar, -(e)s, -e; -ent, -en, -en; -eur, -s, -e; -ist, -en, -en; -ius, -, -se; -ling, -s, -e; -mus, -, men; -tor, -s, -en; aber: das Mobiliar

• Feminine -anz, -, -en; -ei, -, -en; -elle, -, -en; -enz, -, -en; -ette, -, -n; -euse, -, -n; -heit, -, -en; -ie, -, -ien; -ik, -, -en; -in, -, -nen; -ine, -, -n; -ion, -, -en; -ive, -, -n; -keit, -, -en; -schaft, -, -en; -tät, -, -en; -ung, -, -en; -ur, -, -en; aber: Der Kranz, der Lenz, das Bohei

• Neuter -chen, -s, -; -ium, -s, ien; -lein, -s, -; -ment, -s, -e aber: Der Zement

Answer 6

As a tip or trick, it may be worth considering the technique proposed by Dominic O'Brien in his book How To Develop A Perfect Memory.

The basic idea is that you take advantage of the natural human ability to memorize locations and spatial relationships.

Specifically, you choose a town that you know very well and divide it into three 'districts,' each of which corresponds to one of the genders of the German language. As you learn a new word (always with gender, as others have suggested), you will assign it a 'key image' and place it somewhere in the appropriate district.

An example from the text (all of which is available at the above link):

Die Tür (a door): My key image is of a sign saying 'detour' with a big arrow pointing left. It's a feminine word, so I go somewhere in the feminine district of town where there is a door. The museum has a grand old oak entrance (location). I imagine that a big sign has been stuck on the outside of the door announcing a 'detour'. People are filing past, tut-tutting, as they make their way round to a side entrance.

Answer 7

When I was learning French in school, there was basically the same problem.
What my teacher wanted us to do was learn vocabulary with the article (like Pekka suggested) and also color the words in gender-specific colors.
As you can imagine we used blue for male and red for female words, but since there were no neutral words in French (as far as I remember), you may come up with a corresponding color yourself :)

This visual aide seemed to work pretty fine.

Answer 8

I've learned the genders by heart, but they're somehow grouped in my memory so that I remember that a certain class of words belong to a certain gender.

So far nobody has pointed out that there are homophonic words having different gender. Luckily there are some rules to differentiate them, such as "-er is masculine when it denotes somebody/something that does, neutral if it doesn't": Der Messer ("gauge") mißt etwas, das Messer ("knife") mißt nichts, Der Leiter ("leader") leitet etwas, die Leiter ("ladder") leitet nicht.

Answer 9

As a long-time active learner of German language I can tell you that all these rules about how the gender of a certain word can be inferred using its ending or its category: they can help you to come up with a good guess if you don't have a dictionary at hand, but they won't help you much during a conversation or while writing an email. At least I couldn't make any use of them after several attempt to memorize these groups. So, they are very useful as a reference or a rule of thumb, but not for learning words.

The most useful that worked for me, a person of a visual type mostly using his eyes for memorizing new words, is to write down the words without translation a the A4-page folded twice (so that it becomes A6) and cut on one side for easier browsing. For every word you write down you just add the last letter of the corresponding article before it, like for example "r Name", "r Bedarf", "e Mail", "s Taxi", "r Schein" etc. Looking at those helped me a lot later to remember the correct gender just by remembering what letter I had before the word on my cheat sheet.

Another good method I used for some time is to use some Firefox add-ons for training. One add-on called "Artikeltrainer" allows you to turn all articles on every webpage into drop-down lists, so you can easily test yourself how good you remember the genders.

Even better I found another Firefox Add-on I do not find anymore which colorized the words on the current webpage depending upon their gender. It is a pleasure to read Wikipedia article in German and see the genders of every word immediately, it helps later on to recall the gender by just trying to remember what color the word was marked with.

Answer 10

There are some patterns:

Some endings often demand a certain gender, e.g. -nis, -ung, -age

Another rule of thumb is that abstract words are often female.

But the "rules" cover only a very small percentage of words.

Answer 11

As you can see there are patterns, certainly; however, with the time it takes to memorize each "pattern" and their exceptions, you could have simply memorized the article with the word.

One thing that I did was write all Der nouns on a white index card, all Das nouns on a red card, and all Die nouns on a blue card. And it really did get me to associate the noun with the color.

If someone said "Buch", I would think red.

Coincidentally, I did this with the cases, too:

Nominative case = white Accusative case = red Dative case = blue

The color choices were from some mnemonic device that I came up with for myself -- and it made sense for me.

That would probably be better than trying to memorize patterns of noun gender and their many, many, many exceptions.

Answer 12

This is rather late in the day, but I recently stumbled upon a post on "Belles Lettres" on this very topic and was much impressed.

(Note: The video is 84 minutes (!) long and includes pretty in-depth background information on linguistics, language history etc. - a lot of the things he says won't make sense if you haven't at least a nodding acquaintance with this stuff. Also, his choice of examples is sometimes a bit off, but he makes several excellent points.)

This guy does offer a (for me) somewhat surprising view on the topic:

He shows that the grammatical "genus" has only a more or less coincidental connection to "gender", because "Mann" and "Frau" were thought to be somehow "representative" of their grammatical category (genus). What had happened in early history was that people started to use additional endings to express certain aspects.

• The first addition was a group of endings to say that "this is an inanimate object" - this became the "neuter" genus.

• The second addition was a group of endings to say "this is a group of things/people" - this became the "feminine" genus.

• The nouns that didn't take a new ending stayed in the "old" default form - later called the "masculine" genus.

So, no real gender, just grammatical categories that got rather muddled over time.

What this means for the question in hand is this: There are basic guiding rules but also a ton of exceptions - the rules will help somewhat, but you'll still make mistakes. This shouldn't bother you too much, because it happens to everyone. :)

The bit of the video that was really stunning was how he showed the way this allows pretty accurate predictions of what genus new words will likely develop over time. (around the 00:34 mark). This will blow your mind. :)