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Good strike rate for German grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4622 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 1 of 70 08 November 2013 at 12:48am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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German genders seem to be more or less randomly assigned to nouns. Sure, there are some patterns you
can latch on to, -ung words all seem to be feminine. Words like Kind and Ding are neuter because they could represent different things. But it's largely a stab in the dark. Of course it's a good idea to learn the gender along with the noun but you would have to be a robot to get it right all of the time and most people will find their knowledge of nouns soon outstrips their confidence in gender. Extremely common terms like das Auto and der Tisch are branded on your brain through sheer repetition but I reckon even seasoned non-native German speakers find themselves frequently guessing. I always believed that guessing is infinitely preferable to grinding to a halt. So what would be a good percentage strike rate to aim for? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5960 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 2 of 70 08 November 2013 at 2:01am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Taking into consideration that you will be using common words and their genders more often by definition, I think it's good to aim for a 99% strike rate.
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| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5189 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 3 of 70 08 November 2013 at 4:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Time to quit thinking they are randomly assigned. Start by reading a good guide and follow it up with some heavy Anki to drill some of the exceptions into your head. A couple of dozen novels, newspapers, audiobooks or TV shows later and that 99% success rate will start to seem more realistic.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 70 08 November 2013 at 12:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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A week or so ago I took a sheet of paper and divided it into three sections: masculine, feminine and neutrum, and then I copied words from A & B in a dictionary and distributed them into these sections, leaving out all words where I knew a rule (like diminutives, which are neutrum, or nouns on e, which fairly consistently are feminine) - and of course I also wrote the articles. That was actually not as boring as it sounds because of the small surprises I got along the way!
If you really like to do Anki you can of course do it, but then you shouldn't mix the genders if the purpose is to learn to separate them. Add masculine words one day and feminine the next and neutrum one day later. The logical thing would however be to learn those genders from the start, but that's not always possible if you just learn from texts (for instance nouns in the plural don't reveal their gender) - and my school classes in German ended something like forty years ago. It is amazing how many bad habits you can accumulate in that time! Edited by Iversen on 20 November 2013 at 11:14am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5560 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 5 of 70 08 November 2013 at 2:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think we have occasionally asked those natives with genders what it is like having genders, and in particular what it feels like when they don't know the correct one, but it's hard to get any sense out of them. My theory is, it's very much like we think of human genders. If your child comes home from Kindergarten, and says he has a new frien called "Kieren", you might wonder if that was a boy or a girl, or you might not even think about it, and your brain would make an implicit assumption either way. So hopefully it's possible to get into that stage of "making automatic assumptions" rather than guessing. I can't recommend the shared Anki deck "colour-coded German genders" enough (or maybe I can't recommend it too much?). It has made a big difference to my confidence with genders, which seems to somehow have a knock on effect with my entire confidence with the language. (There are a handfull of mistakes in it, and although I assume it's roughly the 6000 most common nouns, there are a few pretty weird choices in it) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| TehGarnt Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 4852 days ago 33 posts - 63 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish | Message 6 of 70 08 November 2013 at 5:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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"Hammer's German Grammar and Usage" has a nice section on the many rules (or more
accurately tendencies) that govern gender assignment. There are all sorts of them involving endings, classes of object, etymology etc, often conflicting in a single word. But of course there are many, many exceptions to all of them. In truth I think the limiting factor to the number of exceptions is the human brain capacity of native speakers, and as long as German literacy stays high second language learners will find it very difficult to avoid mistakes. Kind of like English in regards to spelling, although no-one can hear your terrible spelling when you speak. I'd be very interested in seeing accuracy rates though. Edited by TehGarnt on 08 November 2013 at 5:32pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| fnord Triglot Groupie Switzerland Joined 5033 days ago 71 posts - 124 votes Speaks: German*, Swiss-German, English Studies: Luxembourgish, Dutch | Message 7 of 70 17 November 2013 at 7:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
With a few exceptions: Schwung Sprung Dung are all masculine. These are obviously all one-vovwel, one-syllable (and I really, really cannot think of any other ones that are masculine) -ung words, so you could construe another mental rule around that. But they appear appear a little more “inconspicuous” when used in compounds: Aufschwung Abschwung Hochsprung Freudensprung Absprung Kuhdung
…or conversely pronunciation, which can seem pretty opaque to learners. It’s best to be learnt from the start and through repetition, often seems random, though some rules of thumb can be applied to it (to some extent). But there is one key difference…
If you decide to really care, why not aim for 99%? Though you might adopt the approach of “not worrying too much about it”. Getting German gender wrong doesn’t impede intelligibility much. Of course, if you get literally everything mixed up and wrong, it might be unpleasant to listen to. The occasional mistake however will be tolerated without raising any eyebrows. Put differently: Dedicating your precious (and limited) time and effort to working on other aspects of your German (pronunciation, vocabulary) will, in most cases, prove more useful for actual communication, than getting gender right. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4844 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 8 of 70 17 November 2013 at 9:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
These words are formed by ablaut from a verb (schwingen, springen, düngen) and don't contain the suffix "-ung". If those words were formed with said suffix, they'd be called "Schwingung" (which really exists), "Springung" (which doesn't) and "Düngung" (which does). However, all words that are formed with the suffix "-ung" are by all means feminine. Edited by Josquin on 17 November 2013 at 9:41pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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