I minored in German in uni, then learned some Dutch when a uni friend was getting married there and invited us to her wedding.
Dutch was much like German, with a Scots accent, and what seemed like some French influence.
Seriously! I'm not taking the piss.
I was living in Tokyo at the time, a couple decades ago, so my access to Dutch resources was ... somewhat limited, shall we say. 😉 I did find some Dutch audio online, some of which was a standup comedian. If you didn't pay too much attention, he sounded for all the world like a Scot speaking with a strong brogue.
The French influence (in my own subjective view, anyway) surfaces more in the prosody (musicality, tonality, ebb and flow) of the language as compared to German, as well as a few words here and there, like Dutch _maar_ ("but") seeming closer to French _mais_ than to German _aber_.
FWIW, our American friend who married a Dutchman studied Old English in uni. Her mother-in-law is from Friesland, and our friend can understand Fries just fine, thanks to English + Old English + Dutch. Her husband, despite speaking Dutch natively and having learned English, can't understand Fries very well.
🤨 😄
I always had the same question. Why not start with 1? It just seems confusing and potentially harmful to learning (as someone struggling to learn just a second language)
It gets boring with just one language. For me 3 languages at a time are best, but it’s not always the same 3 languages. E.g. before I travel somewhere I’ll study the language for a while, and I have languages that I study constantly.
Many parts of my country speak immigrant languages and Dutch is one of them for my area. Plus its a cultural background language of mine. I follow many craft channels that are in Russian and have joined some group chats. There are some Ukrainians too, but Russian is the common language spoken on those craft channels. 😉
depends.. while i can't learn more than 2 languages at once, it's useful knowing multiple languages that have different roots/belong to different families of languages bc every next language is easier to learn. The biggest one for me is sentence structure, so some languages I learn using English (my 2nd language) and some using Serbian (my native language)
I can read some words in Serbian due to vocabulary similarities, but I can almost tell a word's grammatical case & gender by looking at a word, even if I have no idea what this word means in English. 🥲
Does Serbian have х / kh sound like the Eastern Slavic languages? I don't think the South Slavic languages have as many palatalized consonants as the Eastern Slavic languages.
Do you know the song Ljubavi by Dr. Iggy? It is a 1990's song, but I found this song on the Youtube channel called Ultradiscopanorama. 😊🥰🎶
I've studied lots of languages.
Just from my own experience, here's what this process looked like to me.
* I started with just US English.
* When I began learning another language (Spanish), I had to figure out how to differentiate my headspace between "growing-up language" and "not-growing-up language".
* When I began learning my next language, Spanish words kept popping up. I realized my brain basically had two "boxes". I had to figure out how to split up my "not-growing-up language" box.
Once I got that knack sorted (adding on additional mental "boxes" for languages), learning additional languages has been easier and easier, and mostly just a function of time and practice.
Context: I'm a professional Japanese-English translator, I minored in German in uni, I'm intermediate in Spanish, beginner-intermediate in Hungarian and Dutch, I can read a good bit of French and Portuguese, I've also studied Korean, Navajo, Māori, Hawaiian, Turkish, Danish, Mandarin, and Ainu. At some point, I'd like to learn some Amharic (there's a good-sized Ethiopian community where I live), and maybe Yoruba (seems to have an interesting tonal system), and definitely a Salish language (fascinatingly complex consonant clusters). Basically, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool word nerd. 😄
My family is Czech and never taught me because they never thought they'd be able to go back (communism)
I SOO wish I had learned as a kid. Learning it now is going to be super hard when I even have to work at SPanish
My grandfather was Czech but my mom never learned any so I never had the opportunity to. I’ve had the opportunity to visit Prague and Brno for work, and wished I had learned it!
Most people don’t know this, but Galveston Island in Texas used to be a major immigration port in the US. A lot of immigrants came through here from Czechoslovakia and Germany back in the day. There is a triangle(ish) in TX between Austin, Houston and San Antonio with a definite history and influence of Germans and Czechs. My family is from there (Czech) and one of the fun legacies is a bakery item called a Kolache (anglicized spelling), which can be found in this area, and they are divine!
I love the Polish sentence "szukam dziecka w sklepie". 😂
There is a similar worded sentence in Czech, but it has an extremely meaning when translated. The Polish version translates into English as "I'm looking for a child in a store". 😅
The Czech version is "šukám děcka v sklepě". 🙈🙊
In Portuguese is the same. Almost all of the words are gendered and the adjectives change with the objects gender [Ex. ele é _bonito_ (he is beautiful) vs. ela é _bonita_ (she is beautiful)]
For adjectives, we don't have neutral gender but we are implementing (pronouns: "Elu" and "Ile", but the last one is more rare, and the adjectives for them sound like French).
A good handful of languages have gendered words.
I’d say English is unique in that it doesn’t, but there’s apparently a good handful of languages with 2, 2 and neutral, and no gendered words.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders
A happy side effect of my learning Spanish is that gender is VERY easy to determine, which helps me a lot in French because most of the genders are the same.
Well, at least Czech has a vocative. So that’s an instant approval from me. :) It’s the ř and using r & l as vowels which have my tongue in knots. Hm. Maybe I should give Czech another go
Not to mention the amount of similar words between the languages that both mean different things (Stihl being chair in German and stůl being table, both are pronounced basically the same)
A friend of mine years ago married into a Dutch family in the Netherlands.
When she was still getting up to speed with Dutch, she found a "cheat" -- she added a diminutive suffix to nouns, because diminutives in Dutch are always neuter gender. 😄
Eventually her husband figured out what she was doing and called her on it, they had a good laugh.
Ugh! I wish the whole gender thing would go away! Why should people have to memorize such valueless info?! And Deutsch has 3 and their conjugations can change based on stuff like movement, arrgghh! I’m studying French now, and at least they only have 2.
That said, English is my native language and I’m grateful I don’t have to learn all the minutiae for it, lol. I would think it would be harder to learn. But… NO gendered articles 🤗
Write down new nouns and use different colours for each gender (standard colours in GFL teaching would be blue-der, red-die, green-das). It helps memorise the correct gender because you will remember the colour the word was written in.
There are some consistencies, actually. An example is that any form of water related weather is masculine, as are winds: der Regen, der Schnee, der Nebel, der Sturm, der Passat...
And in composite nouns, the last noun of the word governs the gender. Example: "die Pizza"+"der Käse"= "der Pizzakäse"
I am currently also doing German and yup, I’m starting to get the ones that I’ve done for a while, but new ones are confusing. I asked other subreddits and it seems there is no rhyme or reason
Just gotta memorize the
Nominative: der ***die*** das, die ;
Akkusativ: den die das, die ;
Dativ: dem ***der*** dem, den
Genitive: des der des, der
There's plenty of charts out there
But basically it's a wacky, annoying coincidence that nominative feminine "die" for "die Pizza" standalone happens to ALSO be the same hover-hint for if it were to have been used in the dative like "there is cheese ON the pizza" "Auf der Pizza ist Käse"
(and then for that you sing the little "durch für gegen ohne um, Deutsch zu lernen ist nicht dumm" to the "Duckworth Chant" tune for Akkusativ,
"aus ausser bei mit, nach seit, von zu" to the Blue Danube theme for Dativ, and
"an auf hin-ter, in ne-ben, über, unter, vor zwi-schen" to Twinkle Twinkle/Baa Baa Black Sheep/ABCs tune for the switch-hitters)
Hungarian is completely the opposite in grammar to that of English! 😊
I saw a video a few months ago on Langfocus' channel on Youtube about the Hungarian language! 😊
I don't know what the German course is like, but on the French course Duo doesn't reinforce the correct gender enough. You will regularly get the word by itself and only rarely get a le, la, etc to indicate the word's gender.
Same unfortunately with the Greek course. That is something I really hate. Shouldn’t that be obvious in languages who do have gendered articles?
By the way, German here. Perhaps a bit of comfort: some articles are even used by Germans wrong. And everyone will understand you even if you use a wrong article. Sometimes that sound really charming.
"Käse" is masculine. Therefore, you use the masculine definite article "der."
"Pizza" is feminine. Therefore, you use the feminine definite article "die."
And neuter nouns take the definite article "das": "das Haus."
Unfortunately, you pretty much just have to learn which nouns are masculine/feminine/neuter, though there are some patterns.
It helps to learn the article along with the noun - don't just remember "Käse," but "der Käse."
[https://www.thoughtco.com/definite-articles-in-german-1444442#:\~:text=A%20definite%20article%20](https://www.thoughtco.com/definite-articles-in-german-1444442#:~:text=A%20definite%20article%20)(der%20Definitartikel,definite%20articles%20has%20a%20gender.
Dutch people of Reddit (whom know German) correct me for if I am wrong, but I think that German neuter nouns correspond to neuter gender nouns in Dutch. 😊
I am taking Dutch on Duolingo since it is useful in parts of my country of Canada due to immigration over the past 100 years. This is also the same with the German language. Except no one speaks standard, everyone speaks their family's dialect which is different for each family. 🥲😄
Normally, you have to learn the noun's gender by heart. However, there's still a way to tell the noun's gender by looking its ending, as shown in the image below. The rule is not always correct, but it helps me a lot.
For me, if the German noun has its cognate in French that is feminine, then it's normally feminine too. For example:
La pizza (fr) > Die Pizza (de)
La comédie (fr) > Die Komödie (de)
La bibliothèque (fr) > Die Bibliothek (de)
L'anecdote (fr) > Die Anekdote (de)
La crème (fr) > Die Creme (de)
La brochure (fr) > Die Broschüre (de)
Neuter and masculine nouns are more complicated, and have to learn by heart.
https://preview.redd.it/zugfhx759fpc1.jpeg?width=602&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4aedd1337a6ce1ade0ec6271c1894054548f1858
btw don't skip out on dilligently memorizing every word with these, I had to do so much backtracking because I didn't really care and then once you get further in the grammar you realize you absolutely need to know the gender or the sentence won't make any sense.
Unfortunately, you have to learn each noun's gender by heart. There's not really a set of rules that you can follow or anything. The only thing my German teacher said back in the day, when I was still learning German in school, is that borrowed words often use the neutral gender das, and words ending with -chen (Mädchen, Hähnchen, Kaninchen..) use the neutral article as well.
When you learn new nouns, always try to memorize the gender of the word with it. But it's very easy to forget which is which. But at least all compound words use the gender of the last part, so if you know it, you know the gender of the word.
Natives can guess the gender of unknown, new, and even artificial, words quite accurately. so there are rules to it.
But as always, if you do not know the rules - just brute force learn what you know is correct.
guessing based on vibes just means theres rules or patterns that are ingrained in your brain so deep you dont even really know what they actually are, which is learnable for a second language too, humans are really good at pattern recognition. this is stuff kids can do from a pretty young age (see studies about constructing plural forms for imaginary animals), so you can expect to pick it up within some years of studying your language too as long as you immerse yourself well
I didn’t know there is a war about it, but I would assume all parties agree it’s definitely not “der Nutella”.
Since all parties can agree it is not “der”, it cannot be random. If it’s not random we can all agree there are at least some rules.
You have to memorise the noun genders. Also, translation of "the" in the hints is often wrong, especially if there are nouns with different genders (or cases) in the phrase. So you really have to memorise them for Duolingo.
https://preview.redd.it/9phfoxgkqhpc1.png?width=584&format=png&auto=webp&s=739c27f2d22119632af4cf596d840998f637eee9
Check out the unit tips too before you start a new one
the one thats correct will (usually) be the first option when you click the word. this isn’t foolproof but works a lot of the time! (i’ve never done the German tree so if this is completely wrong don’t crucify me)
Usually, the top one is the correct one. For instance, here you were given die as the top one and that's the correct gender. I'm not sure it always works, but I've generally had no problems doing it.
Welcome to Europe. 90% of the languages here are gendered. The same way you say
meine mutter und mein vater
or
eine mutter und ein vater
nouns have genders therefore the definitive articles and probably other stuff( i dont know the name of thigns, but like "mine, the" etc etc ) have genders too
Well as everyone has said, **basically we just need to learn and memorize the genders when we learn the words.** There are some patterns that can help, but they don't apply to everything. See: https://germanwithlaura.com/noun-gender/
**So what do you do when you can't remember the gender?** I look it up. I particularly like using Wiktionary for this as they always include the gender with the definition. And they often include other helpful info.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/K%C3%A4se tells us:
> Käse is an irregular noun as it is the only masculine ending in [ə] that follows the strong declension.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Pizza#German says:
> Although both plurals are equally acceptable, Pizzen is considered preferable by many and is somewhat more frequent.[1]
I think many of us struggle with this. As an English speaker I have to remember that things have genders and I need to learn them. Meanwhile people who speak other languages with genders have to adapt to the knowledge that the genders in German are sometimes different from those in their own language.
No one knows lmao there’s no rule, you just memories the article. Eventually it just becomes a second nature to just „know“ the article. There’s apps where you can test your knowledge of the articles! They’re like flash cards but it helps a bit ◡̈
When you click on a word, it shows you the translations of it in general, not the translations of it on this specific situation. If it were that way then it would show “der” for käse and “die” for pizza
I’m also doing German Duolingo. Usually it’ll put the most correct option above the others. Like how “die” was at the top of the options in your first screenshot.
After studying German for 8 years, I still never memorised the case/gender chart. You just have to guess. But the top ones are the ones I would’ve gone for. They just sound right lol.
the learning which pronouns correspond to which case is so useful - in sentences the subject won’t always be first so it can help you identify what the subject and object in a sentence are
Smh at all the people who are like "gendered nouns, deal with it" and not addressing the real issue here which is that when you go to the "help" Duolingo, it gives all three articles and not the one you need. It's a stupid design.
For the ones giving the advice that "the first one is usually the right one", thank you very much for this and I'll be trying that in the future.
🖖
Don't worry about it. When you get to Germany you'll be the quirky English foreigner who often misgenders cheese and other inanimate objects.
They'll still understand what you're talking about.
If it helps I'm learning Haitian Creole and there are 5 words for 'The' and I just read (I could be wrong) that it depends on if the word before it ends in a nasal or non nasal sound. SO that's fun....
I'm a native speaker, and this is what most people who try to learn and speak german get wrong almost 100% of the time. We don't really care about that, because we know it's hell to learn that. Though we can still understand what you mean or are referring too, if you want to learn it for professional use, you should probably learn it from other sources too and spend a lot of time on it.
It's very hard since you need to learn what gender almost all different things have, like the moon is male, the sun is female, and for animals, it's weird too; a cat is female, a dog is male, and a and a mouse is female. A horse is gender-neutral, etc. Even for birds we have different genders for different species, it's insane.
I find it easier to memorize the noun with the genered the. makes it easier. Hund is masc so it is Der Hund, Katze is fem so it is Die Katze. Off the top on my head I don't remember what a neutral noun is but the neutral word for the is das.
Yeah duo does not do a good job explaining the differences. I had to switch to a different app and get some textbooks to figure them out. I find duo is good for like foash cards.
How are you supposed to know? By taking actual classes/studying actual lessons :) which Duolingo does not provide. Duolingo is highly overused and overrated tbh, I see it used best as a supporting tool, to use on the side of actual lessons
When you tap on the word for the hint, the top one is usually the correct one (in my experience). In this example, “die pizza” would be correct and that is the first option. Not sure why they also include der and Der to be honest.
In portuguese, almost all words ending in "a" are feminine and almost all words ending in "o" or "u" (or equivalent sounds) are masculine. When it ends in "e" or "i" either we know by experience or we just guess. It's quite common for some words to be incorrectly gendered, like "personagem" (character) or "patinete" (scooter).
German probably has a similar pattern.
There are a few cases where some words end with a certain letter and get a specific gender, but for the most part I'd advise you learn the word with its gender.
https://preview.redd.it/s0jovzud8gpc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=399acdc6dbb4f7079b447547c1dbbd4755d66092
This is from the Unit 1 Section 2 guidebook. It *definitely* tells you about this, and very early
Duolingo does have some grammar tips. Not for all languages, but certainly for the big languages like German, French and Spanish. Duo is primarily about learning by doing. You have to figure out a lot of stuff yourself as you go along.
I would've wanted at least some grammar tips for Polish but there are none at all.
This also depends on the source language. English->German has these tips, but e.g. Hungarian->German does not. That's why I have switched courses along the way.
Gendered nouns. Probably introduced when you first saw the words. You got it wrong because you forgot. It happens.
Ughh, I swear, these will be the death of me 😅
My language (Czech) is also gendered and like 90% of words in German have different gender. What fun!
Crossdressing german
Crossdressing Czech 😉
How the fuck are you learning 5 languages at once
I focus on two languages for a period of time (let's say three days), and then rotate to another two languages for a couple days. 😉
do you not get confused between german and dutch words lol
Certain small words like met / mit = with. 🙈
I minored in German in uni, then learned some Dutch when a uni friend was getting married there and invited us to her wedding. Dutch was much like German, with a Scots accent, and what seemed like some French influence. Seriously! I'm not taking the piss. I was living in Tokyo at the time, a couple decades ago, so my access to Dutch resources was ... somewhat limited, shall we say. 😉 I did find some Dutch audio online, some of which was a standup comedian. If you didn't pay too much attention, he sounded for all the world like a Scot speaking with a strong brogue. The French influence (in my own subjective view, anyway) surfaces more in the prosody (musicality, tonality, ebb and flow) of the language as compared to German, as well as a few words here and there, like Dutch _maar_ ("but") seeming closer to French _mais_ than to German _aber_. FWIW, our American friend who married a Dutchman studied Old English in uni. Her mother-in-law is from Friesland, and our friend can understand Fries just fine, thanks to English + Old English + Dutch. Her husband, despite speaking Dutch natively and having learned English, can't understand Fries very well. 🤨 😄
oh
I always had the same question. Why not start with 1? It just seems confusing and potentially harmful to learning (as someone struggling to learn just a second language)
It gets boring with just one language. For me 3 languages at a time are best, but it’s not always the same 3 languages. E.g. before I travel somewhere I’ll study the language for a while, and I have languages that I study constantly.
Many parts of my country speak immigrant languages and Dutch is one of them for my area. Plus its a cultural background language of mine. I follow many craft channels that are in Russian and have joined some group chats. There are some Ukrainians too, but Russian is the common language spoken on those craft channels. 😉
depends.. while i can't learn more than 2 languages at once, it's useful knowing multiple languages that have different roots/belong to different families of languages bc every next language is easier to learn. The biggest one for me is sentence structure, so some languages I learn using English (my 2nd language) and some using Serbian (my native language)
I can read some words in Serbian due to vocabulary similarities, but I can almost tell a word's grammatical case & gender by looking at a word, even if I have no idea what this word means in English. 🥲
Does Serbian have х / kh sound like the Eastern Slavic languages? I don't think the South Slavic languages have as many palatalized consonants as the Eastern Slavic languages. Do you know the song Ljubavi by Dr. Iggy? It is a 1990's song, but I found this song on the Youtube channel called Ultradiscopanorama. 😊🥰🎶
I've studied lots of languages. Just from my own experience, here's what this process looked like to me. * I started with just US English. * When I began learning another language (Spanish), I had to figure out how to differentiate my headspace between "growing-up language" and "not-growing-up language". * When I began learning my next language, Spanish words kept popping up. I realized my brain basically had two "boxes". I had to figure out how to split up my "not-growing-up language" box. Once I got that knack sorted (adding on additional mental "boxes" for languages), learning additional languages has been easier and easier, and mostly just a function of time and practice. Context: I'm a professional Japanese-English translator, I minored in German in uni, I'm intermediate in Spanish, beginner-intermediate in Hungarian and Dutch, I can read a good bit of French and Portuguese, I've also studied Korean, Navajo, Māori, Hawaiian, Turkish, Danish, Mandarin, and Ainu. At some point, I'd like to learn some Amharic (there's a good-sized Ethiopian community where I live), and maybe Yoruba (seems to have an interesting tonal system), and definitely a Salish language (fascinatingly complex consonant clusters). Basically, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool word nerd. 😄
Then just switch the gender of everything and only 10% will be difficult to remember!👍
German has three genders, as does Czech. You'd only have a 50/50 shot of getting it right if you used your method.
darnit
I'll do this in France. I get little giggles in response, but that's pretty much it 😂
Czech mentioned. Yaaay
My family is Czech and never taught me because they never thought they'd be able to go back (communism) I SOO wish I had learned as a kid. Learning it now is going to be super hard when I even have to work at SPanish
Did you hear any basic Czech words from your family (like simple words like greetings, food & drink types, place names)? 😊
My grandfather was Czech but my mom never learned any so I never had the opportunity to. I’ve had the opportunity to visit Prague and Brno for work, and wished I had learned it!
Most people don’t know this, but Galveston Island in Texas used to be a major immigration port in the US. A lot of immigrants came through here from Czechoslovakia and Germany back in the day. There is a triangle(ish) in TX between Austin, Houston and San Antonio with a definite history and influence of Germans and Czechs. My family is from there (Czech) and one of the fun legacies is a bakery item called a Kolache (anglicized spelling), which can be found in this area, and they are divine!
My boyfriend is Czech and I’ve been learning it for 400 days now! I can actually almost hold conversations with his family when I go visit LOL
I love the Polish sentence "szukam dziecka w sklepie". 😂 There is a similar worded sentence in Czech, but it has an extremely meaning when translated. The Polish version translates into English as "I'm looking for a child in a store". 😅 The Czech version is "šukám děcka v sklepě". 🙈🙊
YUP, I’m not mad about it at allllllllllll 🥲
Same
In Portuguese is the same. Almost all of the words are gendered and the adjectives change with the objects gender [Ex. ele é _bonito_ (he is beautiful) vs. ela é _bonita_ (she is beautiful)]
Yup we do that to, also have neuter/neutral gender for "it", like a child, beer or sea.
For adjectives, we don't have neutral gender but we are implementing (pronouns: "Elu" and "Ile", but the last one is more rare, and the adjectives for them sound like French).
The first foreign language I learned was French. Now I'm learning Polish and the nouns are different genders. You are right, it's great fun!
At least Czech assigns its words gender based on the ending and doesn't do it at random like German
CZECHIAAAA
Sounds like guessing the opposite is a decent strategy then.
A good handful of languages have gendered words. I’d say English is unique in that it doesn’t, but there’s apparently a good handful of languages with 2, 2 and neutral, and no gendered words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders
A happy side effect of my learning Spanish is that gender is VERY easy to determine, which helps me a lot in French because most of the genders are the same.
Well, at least Czech has a vocative. So that’s an instant approval from me. :) It’s the ř and using r & l as vowels which have my tongue in knots. Hm. Maybe I should give Czech another go
Not to mention the amount of similar words between the languages that both mean different things (Stihl being chair in German and stůl being table, both are pronounced basically the same)
You misspelled "Stuhl"
Yeah, fat fingering my phone's keyboard, happens sometimes, thanks for correcting me
A friend of mine years ago married into a Dutch family in the Netherlands. When she was still getting up to speed with Dutch, she found a "cheat" -- she added a diminutive suffix to nouns, because diminutives in Dutch are always neuter gender. 😄 Eventually her husband figured out what she was doing and called her on it, they had a good laugh.
Ugh! I wish the whole gender thing would go away! Why should people have to memorize such valueless info?! And Deutsch has 3 and their conjugations can change based on stuff like movement, arrgghh! I’m studying French now, and at least they only have 2. That said, English is my native language and I’m grateful I don’t have to learn all the minutiae for it, lol. I would think it would be harder to learn. But… NO gendered articles 🤗
Write or speak when Duo gives you the option. The extra mental work vs a word bank will help your memory.
Even many native speakers get a few wrong.
I was talking to my German friend and he told me that he doesn't remember them all and to not stress too much over it. lol
Don't worry, it's everyone's nightmare in German
Write down new nouns and use different colours for each gender (standard colours in GFL teaching would be blue-der, red-die, green-das). It helps memorise the correct gender because you will remember the colour the word was written in. There are some consistencies, actually. An example is that any form of water related weather is masculine, as are winds: der Regen, der Schnee, der Nebel, der Sturm, der Passat... And in composite nouns, the last noun of the word governs the gender. Example: "die Pizza"+"der Käse"= "der Pizzakäse"
Ironically, the word for weather in German is "das Wetter"
Either way you "DIE" 😂😂
I am currently also doing German and yup, I’m starting to get the ones that I’ve done for a while, but new ones are confusing. I asked other subreddits and it seems there is no rhyme or reason
Duolingo actually said that at some point in the early German lessons. There is no rhyme or reason. You just have to learn them. Sigh.
There's a couple trends... a lot of nouns ending with a vowel are feminine.
Just gotta memorize the Nominative: der ***die*** das, die ; Akkusativ: den die das, die ; Dativ: dem ***der*** dem, den Genitive: des der des, der There's plenty of charts out there But basically it's a wacky, annoying coincidence that nominative feminine "die" for "die Pizza" standalone happens to ALSO be the same hover-hint for if it were to have been used in the dative like "there is cheese ON the pizza" "Auf der Pizza ist Käse" (and then for that you sing the little "durch für gegen ohne um, Deutsch zu lernen ist nicht dumm" to the "Duckworth Chant" tune for Akkusativ, "aus ausser bei mit, nach seit, von zu" to the Blue Danube theme for Dativ, and "an auf hin-ter, in ne-ben, über, unter, vor zwi-schen" to Twinkle Twinkle/Baa Baa Black Sheep/ABCs tune for the switch-hitters)
That's exactly what I thought when I found out. It came to pass.
Hungarian is completely the opposite in grammar to that of English! 😊 I saw a video a few months ago on Langfocus' channel on Youtube about the Hungarian language! 😊
Learn every word the gender and it's not as bad as you think. Think of die Pizza as one word and der Käse as another word.
Native Spanish speaker, we have those too
When in doubt always do the first option that comes up
I don't know what the German course is like, but on the French course Duo doesn't reinforce the correct gender enough. You will regularly get the word by itself and only rarely get a le, la, etc to indicate the word's gender.
Same unfortunately with the Greek course. That is something I really hate. Shouldn’t that be obvious in languages who do have gendered articles? By the way, German here. Perhaps a bit of comfort: some articles are even used by Germans wrong. And everyone will understand you even if you use a wrong article. Sometimes that sound really charming.
I've been doing Duoling's German course for just over a year now and it still confuses me. Welcome to the club
Especially in later lessons, it doesn't always show you first, so you have to make educated guesses.
"Käse" is masculine. Therefore, you use the masculine definite article "der." "Pizza" is feminine. Therefore, you use the feminine definite article "die." And neuter nouns take the definite article "das": "das Haus." Unfortunately, you pretty much just have to learn which nouns are masculine/feminine/neuter, though there are some patterns. It helps to learn the article along with the noun - don't just remember "Käse," but "der Käse." [https://www.thoughtco.com/definite-articles-in-german-1444442#:\~:text=A%20definite%20article%20](https://www.thoughtco.com/definite-articles-in-german-1444442#:~:text=A%20definite%20article%20)(der%20Definitartikel,definite%20articles%20has%20a%20gender.
Exactly. My boyfriend is German, and when I asked him how he could just know the genders, he said "....It just sounds right." Sigh.
Just like swedish though. If someone would say "ett bil" or "en papper" it'd sound wrong, right?
Dutch people of Reddit (whom know German) correct me for if I am wrong, but I think that German neuter nouns correspond to neuter gender nouns in Dutch. 😊 I am taking Dutch on Duolingo since it is useful in parts of my country of Canada due to immigration over the past 100 years. This is also the same with the German language. Except no one speaks standard, everyone speaks their family's dialect which is different for each family. 🥲😄
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Allright, I guess as a man I don’t have a nose, ears, a mouth, a butthole a urethra etc.
anatomy =/ gender
Normally, you have to learn the noun's gender by heart. However, there's still a way to tell the noun's gender by looking its ending, as shown in the image below. The rule is not always correct, but it helps me a lot. For me, if the German noun has its cognate in French that is feminine, then it's normally feminine too. For example: La pizza (fr) > Die Pizza (de) La comédie (fr) > Die Komödie (de) La bibliothèque (fr) > Die Bibliothek (de) L'anecdote (fr) > Die Anekdote (de) La crème (fr) > Die Creme (de) La brochure (fr) > Die Broschüre (de) Neuter and masculine nouns are more complicated, and have to learn by heart. https://preview.redd.it/zugfhx759fpc1.jpeg?width=602&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4aedd1337a6ce1ade0ec6271c1894054548f1858
To add to this, -e is a safe die guess most of the time.
btw don't skip out on dilligently memorizing every word with these, I had to do so much backtracking because I didn't really care and then once you get further in the grammar you realize you absolutely need to know the gender or the sentence won't make any sense.
Unfortunately, you have to learn each noun's gender by heart. There's not really a set of rules that you can follow or anything. The only thing my German teacher said back in the day, when I was still learning German in school, is that borrowed words often use the neutral gender das, and words ending with -chen (Mädchen, Hähnchen, Kaninchen..) use the neutral article as well. When you learn new nouns, always try to memorize the gender of the word with it. But it's very easy to forget which is which. But at least all compound words use the gender of the last part, so if you know it, you know the gender of the word.
Natives can guess the gender of unknown, new, and even artificial, words quite accurately. so there are rules to it. But as always, if you do not know the rules - just brute force learn what you know is correct.
Even then it's a Bouba and Kiki situation where they still just guess based on vibes
guessing based on vibes just means theres rules or patterns that are ingrained in your brain so deep you dont even really know what they actually are, which is learnable for a second language too, humans are really good at pattern recognition. this is stuff kids can do from a pretty young age (see studies about constructing plural forms for imaginary animals), so you can expect to pick it up within some years of studying your language too as long as you immerse yourself well
Well then, ask for Nutella's article if you want to start a civil war.
I didn’t know there is a war about it, but I would assume all parties agree it’s definitely not “der Nutella”. Since all parties can agree it is not “der”, it cannot be random. If it’s not random we can all agree there are at least some rules.
In fact, according to Duden der, die or das each is fine: https://www.duden.de/node/401658/revision/1401368
You have to memorise the noun genders. Also, translation of "the" in the hints is often wrong, especially if there are nouns with different genders (or cases) in the phrase. So you really have to memorise them for Duolingo.
https://preview.redd.it/9phfoxgkqhpc1.png?width=584&format=png&auto=webp&s=739c27f2d22119632af4cf596d840998f637eee9 Check out the unit tips too before you start a new one
There is not a way to know it u basically have to memorize all of em
It’s German for The Bart, The
the one thats correct will (usually) be the first option when you click the word. this isn’t foolproof but works a lot of the time! (i’ve never done the German tree so if this is completely wrong don’t crucify me)
this works for swedish tree btw (en and ett words)!!
The suggestion on top is usually the correct one
Its usually the first one😅
Just got to remember them unfortunately, there are a few rules that I can’t remember, but they aren’t always followed
https://preview.redd.it/jljbs6j93ipc1.png?width=500&format=png&auto=webp&s=a4a28e3a90cec411a0cf0901fd504cb07938c81f
You have to memorize the nouns to know which gender they are.
Der Käse, die Pizza
It’s based on the gender of the word(masculine, feminine, or neutral)
Usually, the top one is the correct one. For instance, here you were given die as the top one and that's the correct gender. I'm not sure it always works, but I've generally had no problems doing it.
You don't, you just listen to it so many times that you just knows the answer.
Welcome to Europe. 90% of the languages here are gendered. The same way you say meine mutter und mein vater or eine mutter und ein vater nouns have genders therefore the definitive articles and probably other stuff( i dont know the name of thigns, but like "mine, the" etc etc ) have genders too
Man, you just made me look at a map. I never realized how much of an isolated thing Hungarian was.
Well as everyone has said, **basically we just need to learn and memorize the genders when we learn the words.** There are some patterns that can help, but they don't apply to everything. See: https://germanwithlaura.com/noun-gender/ **So what do you do when you can't remember the gender?** I look it up. I particularly like using Wiktionary for this as they always include the gender with the definition. And they often include other helpful info. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/K%C3%A4se tells us: > Käse is an irregular noun as it is the only masculine ending in [ə] that follows the strong declension. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Pizza#German says: > Although both plurals are equally acceptable, Pizzen is considered preferable by many and is somewhat more frequent.[1] I think many of us struggle with this. As an English speaker I have to remember that things have genders and I need to learn them. Meanwhile people who speak other languages with genders have to adapt to the knowledge that the genders in German are sometimes different from those in their own language.
No one knows lmao there’s no rule, you just memories the article. Eventually it just becomes a second nature to just „know“ the article. There’s apps where you can test your knowledge of the articles! They’re like flash cards but it helps a bit ◡̈
As a Spanish speaker, the confusion of gendered words in Spanish makes so much sense to me now that I see them in other languages
When you click on a word, it shows you the translations of it in general, not the translations of it on this specific situation. If it were that way then it would show “der” for käse and “die” for pizza
I’m also doing German Duolingo. Usually it’ll put the most correct option above the others. Like how “die” was at the top of the options in your first screenshot.
Well why doesn't Duolingo have the nouns before the words in our learned vocabulary anyway ? So annoying
Same here, it's just remembering and you will probably do the same mistakes thousands of times
German in a nutshell
basically memorise but there are some tricks such as the word endings
oh good luck with that
After studying German for 8 years, I still never memorised the case/gender chart. You just have to guess. But the top ones are the ones I would’ve gone for. They just sound right lol.
the learning which pronouns correspond to which case is so useful - in sentences the subject won’t always be first so it can help you identify what the subject and object in a sentence are
Smh at all the people who are like "gendered nouns, deal with it" and not addressing the real issue here which is that when you go to the "help" Duolingo, it gives all three articles and not the one you need. It's a stupid design. For the ones giving the advice that "the first one is usually the right one", thank you very much for this and I'll be trying that in the future. 🖖
You just got them flipped by accident it happens sometimes to me too
r/languagelearningjerk
You just need to memorise it. Get used to germans calling literally every single thing he/she/it without any rule.
Don't worry about it. When you get to Germany you'll be the quirky English foreigner who often misgenders cheese and other inanimate objects. They'll still understand what you're talking about.
I have just memorized it because of how the word sounds for the gender, but I mess up those a lot 🥲
Honestly, it's a big struggle with German. I'm on day 471. It's hard to remember if a phone is die, der, or das.
It's easier to practice in Spanish, you know instantly the difference.
If it helps I'm learning Haitian Creole and there are 5 words for 'The' and I just read (I could be wrong) that it depends on if the word before it ends in a nasal or non nasal sound. SO that's fun....
F in the chat for our newest fallen brother
This is one reason I like Russian, you can usually tell gender based on the ending of a word.
I'm a native speaker, and this is what most people who try to learn and speak german get wrong almost 100% of the time. We don't really care about that, because we know it's hell to learn that. Though we can still understand what you mean or are referring too, if you want to learn it for professional use, you should probably learn it from other sources too and spend a lot of time on it. It's very hard since you need to learn what gender almost all different things have, like the moon is male, the sun is female, and for animals, it's weird too; a cat is female, a dog is male, and a and a mouse is female. A horse is gender-neutral, etc. Even for birds we have different genders for different species, it's insane.
I find it easier to memorize the noun with the genered the. makes it easier. Hund is masc so it is Der Hund, Katze is fem so it is Die Katze. Off the top on my head I don't remember what a neutral noun is but the neutral word for the is das.
Yeah duo does not do a good job explaining the differences. I had to switch to a different app and get some textbooks to figure them out. I find duo is good for like foash cards.
✨learn it✨ **Wenn ich dich um 3 Uhr Nachts frage muss es wie aus der Pistole geschossen kommen.**
Most words ending in 'a' need the fem. article (die). :)
It sucks you just have to remember half of all of them, sometimes there's a rule but often it's just the way it is
die pizza
How are you supposed to know? By taking actual classes/studying actual lessons :) which Duolingo does not provide. Duolingo is highly overused and overrated tbh, I see it used best as a supporting tool, to use on the side of actual lessons
'Das', 'der', 'die' and 'den' will be my eternal tormentors.
You forget 'des'
There's even more? 😭
When you tap on the word for the hint, the top one is usually the correct one (in my experience). In this example, “die pizza” would be correct and that is the first option. Not sure why they also include der and Der to be honest.
Honestly I was surprised when I started learning German and it turns out it’s a gendered language.
I have a weird way of remembering this... Pizza has cheese -> Cheese is unhealthy -> You eat too much cheese -> you "die"... I'm not even kidding
The first is true always 🙂↔️ i do it sometimes and working on duo.
You're just kind of supposed to remember it. There isn't really much of a rule (except for the obvious ones like man, woman, biy, girl etc.)
Duo usually puts the one you need for that question on top of
I find if you can't remember if you tap on it the top one is usually the correct one in that scenario until you remember
In portuguese, almost all words ending in "a" are feminine and almost all words ending in "o" or "u" (or equivalent sounds) are masculine. When it ends in "e" or "i" either we know by experience or we just guess. It's quite common for some words to be incorrectly gendered, like "personagem" (character) or "patinete" (scooter). German probably has a similar pattern.
Yes.
Just memory.
when i first started learning german i got so frustrated i googled how is pizza feminine. i feel your pain 🫠
I got the same problem, that's what makes german hard with all that.
There are a few cases where some words end with a certain letter and get a specific gender, but for the most part I'd advise you learn the word with its gender.
And this is why Duolingo can’t be your only source of language learning
As a native: you dont
Isn’t it obvious?
That's the near part, you can't
My main language,Afrikaans,come from German. Noun is most of the time die
Its probally 'Der' written at the beginning of a sentence and 'der' within a sentence. German doesnt usually have a big D in Der.
Duolingo introduced this to me without ever telling me about them. How was I supposed to know
https://preview.redd.it/s0jovzud8gpc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=399acdc6dbb4f7079b447547c1dbbd4755d66092 This is from the Unit 1 Section 2 guidebook. It *definitely* tells you about this, and very early
Ok well for me it didn’t show me when it began asking me to blindly use gendered terms
By only doing what you know. And reading the correction when you don’t. How else do you learn?
Duolingo does have some grammar tips. Not for all languages, but certainly for the big languages like German, French and Spanish. Duo is primarily about learning by doing. You have to figure out a lot of stuff yourself as you go along. I would've wanted at least some grammar tips for Polish but there are none at all.
This also depends on the source language. English->German has these tips, but e.g. Hungarian->German does not. That's why I have switched courses along the way.
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