German Gender (Word length 5 or less)

German has the word 'the' expressed in 3 ways: Der = Masculine gender, Die = Ferminine gender, Das = Neuter gender.

It is a hassle to learn the gender of nouns. However, there are general rules where a particular word ending implies the gender of the noun.

But, often, you look at the suffix (the end of the word) and it does not satisfy one of those general rules; and then you are stuck.

I know quite a lot of German words but I never was interested in learning the gender (Der, Die, Das) until now. I have filtered a big vocabulary list for nouns which are 5 characters in length or less. There are about a 1000 words. I then filtered on the words that are either feminine or neuter. If I can learn the gender of those words then any remaining word that is 5 characters or less is very probably masculine.

So now the question is: how do I nicely learn the gender of the feminine and neuter words?

I have presented vocabulary in groupings of up to 4 words. Eg. grouping 'Wut, Uhr, Kuh, Ehe' and the image here:

The words in the first grouping are in descending alphabetical order. That implies that they are all feminine.

The words in the second grouping are in ascending alphabetical order. That implies that they are all neuter.

So now the challenge is to learn the groupings; and that will teach me a lot of Feminine and Neuter words; and anything left out is very likely to be masculine and use 'Der' for 'The'.

(I should acknowledge that the word list is based on one from Wikipedia: https://frequencylists.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-2980-most-frequently-used-german.html?m=1 )

Here are two word lists where one is in descending order across a grouping (Feminine); and one list is in ascending order (Neuter):

Feminine (Die): length 5 or less when singular:

Neuter (Das): if length is 5 or less when singular:

So I can see a noun, recall the grouping list it occurs in (if it does occur in one of the groupings); and thus know the gender.

A plural word like Feen would need expressing as Fee (singular) before applying the rule.

Note that the two lists do not state Das or Der because word order implies them.

The 'Das word length 5 or less' lists occur in the article about 'Story': Story System. I can express these lists as linked word stories; and it is probably a nicer way to learn them than repeating the lists as if they are lyrics.

Six letter German words

See the other German article to look at a selection of 6 letter or more German word mnemonic stories for nouns ending in er/el/en.

Encoding plurals into the stories

We saw in an article about cards and magic that the AA-ZZ system can allw one person to represent 5 options x 5 options x 5 options x 5 options. If we can express types of plural as 5 types then the short stories for neuter and for feminine gender (conssisting of 4 vocabulary words) coud have an AA-ZZ erson added to the story where that person's letter pair encodes a 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 setting of plural clues:

1. No change to the word when making its plural (and potentially a word which does not have an obvious plural)

2. Add N to the end (or EN if the word ends with a vowel)

3. Alter a vowela nd give it an accent.

4. Alter a vowel and alter the ending as well.

5. Other

Then letters A to Y can represent 5 x 5 : represent 2 of the option combinations; and then a letter pair person represents 5 x 5 x 5 clues about the plura of the sequence of 4 words of the story.

If a story is 3 words then we could just say that item one of a 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 person is "1. No change to the word when making its plural" so that we can then use the other three options to create an AA-ZZ person.

Long term, this is not a good way to know plurals: they need to be known spontaneously; but it could be a good method for certainty in an exam writing situation.

Bite size language Learning

Even though I want to learn a language fast, I like the idea of learning a little bit each day rather than trying to force a lot of language learning into a big block of the day.

In the morning, I can study an online learning course; and then think about the lesson a bit later on in the day when I take a walk. I like the idea that there is no big pressure on me to learn fast.

I think that the short video stories containing a small number of vocabulary items is going to be useful in the future; even if I study a different labguage, I can use those visuals and imagine spin-off sotries that help me to learn the vocabulary. For example, in the video story where goose = Gans, if I later tried to learn Irish, goose = gé; and I could imagine the GE person from the AA to ZZ article doing something to the goose: associating 'ge' with goose to memorise 'gé'. Just learning the first two letters of a longer word is a better prompt than none at all!

My picture dictionary of 1000 images project is meant to be like that as well: a standard visual for the meaning of a word; and then imagine a story to learn the foreign word for that picture.