There are some general guidelines, which hold true more often than not: germanwithlaura.com/noun-gender/
Comment on why
zakobjoa@lemmy.world 2 days agoYou’d love German – there is absolutely zero system or logic behind what word has which of the three genders.
Pilon23@feddit.dk 2 days ago
kossa@feddit.org 2 days ago
Yeah, no, it doesn’t make sense:
Der Mann (the man - male article)
Die Frau (the woman - female article)
Der Junge (the boy - male article)
Das Mädchen (the girl - neutral article)
Like, come on gendered articles, you had one job.
skibidi@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Anything with -chen/-klein (a diminutive) is neuter.
E.g. in addition to Mädchen there is Jungchen (~“youngster”) that is also neuter rather than masculine.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
The girl one was always funny to me. “The girl ran to its mother.”
9bananas@feddit.org 2 days ago
doesn’t work at all, completely breaks down for the planetoids and moons…
which makes sense, since those names are not german, which is why german grammar doesn’t apply to them.
latin loanwords work the same way in german as they do in latin: completely at random and just have to be memorized…but at least they do follow the gender of the deity, so if you know your greco-roman pantheon it’s pretty easy!
LwL@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Still mostly only good as a guessing guideline because there’s no real system, just etymological patterns, but yea you can guess more than 33% for sure.
Pilon23@feddit.dk 1 day ago
It’s not perfect, no, but I feel like you can identify feminine words based on their endings alone in 90% of cases, and if you can use a few general rules to make masculine/neuter better than a 50-50 guess, you’re already right more often than you’re wrong. Maybe even 75% with no rote menorization whatsoever
LegoBrickOnFire@lemmy.world 1 day ago
There are some rules. Some of them are easy. One word ending is always feminine. I don’t remember which tho. which is a shame :/
nightlily@leminal.space 1 day ago
-ung is always feminin (among others like -keit) and mostly -e but the exceptions are enough that you can’t relax.
idunnololz@lemmy.world 2 days ago
three?!
OrganicMustard@lemmy.world 2 days ago
German is woke
jlow@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
It totally isn’t unfortunately, the gender neutral pronoun (if that’s what it’s called?) doesn’t work for humans.
9bananas@feddit.org 2 days ago
oh, it does work…
…if you’re bigoted enough.
dankm@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
The neuter pronoun (“it”) doesn’t work for humans in English either.
Hjalamanger@feddit.nu 1 day ago
Why not though? Just because it sounds rude or something?
Demdaru@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Polish also has three. She, he, it/this.
Lysergid@lemmy.ml 13 hours ago
Polish also distinguishes oni (they he) and one (they it/she). Probably most sexist language I know
de_lancre@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I think most slavic languages in general, not just polish.
KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Yeah, a lot of european languages have a three gender system: masculine, feminine and neuter
Proto-Indo-European, the language which most European (and some South Asian languages) originate from, had a three gender system
Even English used to have a three gender system before it disappeared in the Middle English period
Despite the name, the neuter gender tends to not be used for people, although in some languages (such as Polish) the use of the neuter gender to refer to non-binary people is gaining traction
hydrashok@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Yep. Masculine, feminine, and neuter. It’s annoyingly hard to learn. Plus all the other adjectives and such change to match. It’s wild.
rautapekoni@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
When I studied German a bit for fun I gave up on trying to memorize the genders and just used “das” for everything. Yeah it’s wildly incorrect but still mostly understandable which is fine for me.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Just say d’. It’s not wrong, it’s an abbreviation for whatever it’s supposed to be!