“Every noun has a gender, and there is neither sense nor system in the distribution; therefore you must learn the gender of each noun by heart. There is no other way. If you want to tackle this, you must have a memory like a memorial book.”
This is how Mark Twain saw the matter of German article rules in his essay on ‘The Awful German Language’: For him, there are no article rules.
This suggests that Mark Twain unfortunately had quite poor German lessons. He shares this sad fate with many others who want to learn German. Until today.
Unfortunately, we at S&W Training have to deal with “victims” of poor German lessons time and time again, especially when it comes to this topic: an alarming number of clients come to us convinced that there are no article rules in the German language. Consequently, they think they have to learn the article for each noun individually. Just like Mark Twain described.
Incompetent teachers have imposed a lot of avoidable learning on their “victims” – and that with such an important subject. After all, it is hardly possible to form a correct German sentence if the articles are not correct.
Of course, there are many nouns whose genus cannot be explained by any rule. But many other nouns follow helpful rules.
This link
https://sw-training.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Artikelregeln1.pdf
for example, will take you to a table that always proves extremely useful for all those who already know one of the Romance languages French, Spanish, Italian, …). They will see at first glance that very many German nouns are very similar to words from their own language and almost always have the same genus. *)
There are exceptions, of course, but almost only in the case of nouns that come from Latin and are also neutral in German. This is because the Romance languages have abolished the neuter.
There are many more helpful rules on this important topic.
With their help, our clients can almost always reduce their error rate in articles by at least 50% within 30 minutes.
Do you want to achieve the same? Then book a German language course with S&W Training – face-to-face or online:
Or try our vocabulary training. There, too, we help you to learn not only individual words, but also useful patterns and rules – and, of course, the most important exceptions to these rules.
*) Of course, we are aware that this table – more or less modified – will also find its way into the material of some of our competitors. That does not bother us. Maybe then more people will get less bad German lessons than before.
We want to offer help – not to withhold.