Comment on why
Pilon23@feddit.dk 2 months agoThere are some general guidelines, which hold true more often than not: germanwithlaura.com/noun-gender/
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!
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.
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
kossa@feddit.org 2 months 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 months 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.
kossa@feddit.org 2 months ago
But there’s no Mäd.
wieson@feddit.org 2 months ago
Maid. Man kann sich auch lernresistenter geben als man ist.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
The girl one was always funny to me. “The girl ran to its mother.”