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How to cope with genders? | ||
Tags: Gender | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Matheus Senior Member Brazil Joined 5082 days ago 208 posts - 312 votes  Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, French | Message 17 of 33 28 August 2011 at 6:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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Never learn a word without its gender, or you will have many problems in the future.
I speak Portuguese natively, and for me it's normal. I had a German free class last year, and I still remember the genders. "Die Frau", "Das Auto", "Das Mädchen", "Die Welt". If I hadn't learnt those words with their genders, it wouldn't be possible. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| therumsgone Diglot Groupie United States Joined 6538 days ago 93 posts - 105 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 18 of 33 04 September 2011 at 7:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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I try to memorize a word with its gender, but this is easier said than done. When you learn words in context, you're
not necessarily given all the necessary information (I'm thinking about plurals, which use the same article regardless of gender). You can try to learn all the rules, however I think the best way to learn genders is through exposure and repetition. When you hear words a ton of times, their gender just sounds "right." That said, my method for learning genders is to pay particular attention to when a word is feminine. Why? Well, first off, if a word isn't feminine, it's going to be masculine. There are more masculine words in French than feminine words, so if I don't remember specifically learning that a word is feminine, and I can't tell by its ending, it's safe to just guess masculine. Ideally, I would always just know, but in reality, I sometimes don't. So this works for me. Edited by therumsgone on 04 September 2011 at 7:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Taikonotatsujin Diglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5981 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Russian | Message 19 of 33 05 September 2011 at 4:57am | IP Logged | ||
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I learn words together with their genders. I don't know if it is helping or not, but for German I write masculine nouns in blue, neuter ones in green and feminine ones in red in my notebook.
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| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4669 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 20 of 33 26 November 2012 at 11:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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German genders of extended vocabulary (that is words that are not too common) are first things foreign speakers of German (even advanced once) forget when they lose contact with the German language for some time.
You will still now what Negativ, Konus, Hydrant, Mikroskop, Mikron, Mikrokosmos, Protokoll, Zyklon, Modul, Defizit, Cholera, Abrakadabra, Zebra, Gorilla, Kollektiv, Kolibri, Komitee... mean, although you may not be able to guess/remember the correct gender. Edited by Medulin on 26 November 2012 at 11:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4522 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 21 of 33 26 November 2012 at 11:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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It gets funny when the use of gender isn't consistent. Standard German has a (growing) set of words where more than one gender is possible. This suggests that all variants are right, but in the ear of the native speaker, usually only one variant really sounds right, and that variant differs between regions and sometimes even within one region. Especially new loan words are problematic. As we probably haven't seen them in a lot of texts before, we just use our intuition, and that differs. I guess most loanwords will be either masculine or neuter, and the preference might depend on the region of the speaker and/or the phonetic similarity of the loan word to an established word and/or the gender of the corresponding German word if there is one.
der Download, das Image, die Shell ... everything is possible, but those are established words der/das Laptop? I would say 'der', others might find that weird (there is the word 'das Top' in German and I don't think it can be 'der Top') Gender can be tricky even for native speakers. For new words, we would be better off without it. But that's wishful thinking. I don't know much about the Romance languages, but I've experienced something similar even with a small language like Danish. New loan words aren't much of a problem there however, but some established ones. But then, there is this dialect group which has a completely different system of classifying nouns into genders (a very logical one) than rigsdansk. Edited by daegga on 26 November 2012 at 11:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| osoymar Tetraglot Pro Member United States Joined 4737 days ago 190 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English*, German, Portuguese, Japanese Studies: Spanish, French Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 33 27 November 2012 at 1:16am | IP Logged | ||
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I've had the best success with associating non-sexual images to words in German. Not
sure why this works better than just thinking of nouns as having male, female, or robot characteristics (my previous method, along with the hopeless idea of just putting the article in front of the word), but it does. My system: Der: fire, heat Das: beer, water Die: flower, blooming, overgrowing So for Haar, I imagine a woman taking a luxurious shower with beer flowing through her hair. For Blumentopf I think of the pipes in super mario brothers with flowers that shoot fire. Of course, I don't bother for words that just make sense, either instinctively or because of rules. And I make sure to include grammar check in my review of flashcards. And then there are plurals, which are still a complete nightmare... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| showtime17 Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Slovakia gainweightjournal.co Joined 6085 days ago 154 posts - 210 votes Speaks: Russian, English*, Czech*, Slovak*, French, Spanish Studies: Ukrainian, Polish, Dutch | Message 23 of 33 21 January 2013 at 5:05pm | IP Logged | ||
Could you give the link to your post on the book? thanks! :) Edited by showtime17 on 21 January 2013 at 5:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4666 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 24 of 33 21 January 2013 at 5:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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Right now I'm making a giant Anki deck with vocab words in it, but with all the articles omitted. That way I can review both the gender and the word meaning at the same time.
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