Once you have decided to study German, for sure you have heard about many terrible things, like the awful grammar etc. With a bit of effort, one can manage it. But there is one part of the language, where you can hardly find any rule. It seems that students often just give up to learn the German articles properly.
Have you ever been wondering why all kids are able to master their mother tongue perfectly? The first answer is: They have much more time as you might have, and they get the full-immersion class for free. However, you might be comforted by the fact that German kids also struggle with the articles. After a lot of trial and error, they will eventually learn the right one. You probably can’t afford to spend so much time as kids do, so you must find some other strategies. One is, for sure, to focus on the articles in order to shorten the dedicated time. However, there is another way, which I want to show you.
Many students have no clue why the hell the skirt in German is masculine and the sun is feminine. The articles seem to be assigned randomly. Actually, some studies show that this is not true. German native speakers were asked to assign an article to made-up words. One would expect that there would be no difference between the three articles, and that they would be chosen randomly. But that is not what happened. For a certain word, only one gender was chosen by the majority of the participants. That means that rather than the meaning the sound is important for the grammatical gender.
Maybe you have already come across a list of certain endings. Let’s have a look:
All nouns with the following endings are masculine: der
| ending | examples | |
| -ling | Liebling, Flüchtling, Schmetterling, Zwilling | |
| -or | Direktor, Professor, Autor, Monitor, Motor | |
| -loge | Biologe, Psychologe | |
| -ist | Polizist, Spezialist, Jurist, Komponist | |
| -ant (person) | Praktikant, Repräsentant, Elefant,* | |
| -ent | Student, Präsident | |
| -eur | Friseur, Monteur, Akteur | |
| -iker | Musiker, Optiker, Chemiker | |
| -ismus | Optimismus, Pessimismus, Opportunismus | |
| -aut | Astronaut |
* Restaurant is of French origin and not a person.
Most of the nouns are describing people, the majority professions. These nouns are masculine, because they can be used only for a male person. We get the female counterpart by adding –in, for example ‘der Direktor’ is a male director or manager, but a female one is ‘die Direktorin’, ‘der Biologe’ is male, ‘die Biologin’ is female, ‘der Student’ is male, ‘die Studentin’ is female, and so forth.
Not only regarding these endings, but for all nouns describing people we can say that the physical gender and the grammatical gender are the same, e.g. der Erzähler’ and ‘der Spieler’ are male, while ‘die Erzählerin’ and ‘die Spielerin’ are female.
All nouns with the following endings are feminine: die
| ending | examples | |
| -ung | Zeitung, Buchung, Untersuchung | |
| -heit | Freiheit, Schönheit, Mehrheit, Gesundheit | |
| -keit | Möglichkeit, Schnelligkeit, Eitelkeit | |
| -schaft | Mannschaft, Freundschaft, Bereitschaft | |
| -ion | Information, Situation, Diskussion, Station | |
| -ik | Musik, Physik, Politik, Fabrik, Optik | |
| -ät | Universität, Fakultät, Spezialität, Nationalität | |
| -thek | Bibliothek, Videothek | |
| -ei | Bäckerei, Metzgerei, Polizei, Bücherei | |
| -ur | Kultur, Natur, Reparatur, Frisur | |
| -ie | Chemie, Biologie, Psychologie, Demokratie | |
| -enz | Frequenz, Konkurrenz |
All nouns with the following endings are neuter:das
| ending | examples | |
| -chen | Mädchen, Brötchen | |
| -um | Museum, Universum, Datum | |
| -ment | Argument, Dokument, Instrument |
These tables are pretty helpful, however, they don’t cover most of the German words. Many of these words are easy to understand because they are foreign words, as Situation or Biologie. What about the words of German origin? Here, the matter becomes a little bit more complicated.
Let’s start with the most prominent rule:
Most of the words ending in –e are feminine, like die Banane, die Rose, die Sprache (language). On top of that, the plural ending is always –n. So, we get die Bananen, die Rosen, die Sprachen. This rule works really well when we are talking about things, e.g. die Hose, or abstract nouns derived from adjectives, like die Kälte (kalt – cold), die Höhe (hoch – high).
There are only a few exceptions: der Name, der Käse (cheese), das Ende (end), der Gedanke (thought), das Interesse (interest) and some of the collective nouns (see below).
However, it is different when we are talking about animated objects, most of them people or animals, e.g. der Junge (boy), der Biologe (biologist, male), der Kranke (sick person, male), der Beamte (civil servant, male).
These masculine nouns ending in –e are particular because they behave slightly different from other nouns.
Either they follow the n-declination, like der Junge or der Biologe. This means that in the accusative, dative and genitive case they are declined getting –n even in the singular, e.g. mit dem Jungen etc.
Or they behave like an adjective, like der Kranke or der Beamte, but ein Kranker or ein Beamter. And most of them have a female counterpart, like die Biologin or die Beamtin.
The next rule regards the meaning. Many instruments, tools, devices ending in –er are masculine, e.g. der Computer, der Drucker (printer), der Kugelschreiber (ball pen), der Korkenzieher (corkscrew), der Sender (broadcast station) etc. That is somehow confirmed by the fact that (die) Mutter (mother)and (die) Butter (butter) are feminine nouns.
Most of the nouns ending in –en are masculine, like der Garten (garden), der Ofen (oven), der Laden (shop), der Rasen (lawn), der Boden (ground). However, for this rule exists an exception.
When the infinitive form of a verb is turned into a noun the noun will be neuter: das Leben (life), das Essen (food), das Schwimmen (swimming), das Fernsehen (TV).
Many older foreign words are neuter: das Auto (car), das Telefon, das Radio, das Kino (cinema), das Café, das Hotel, das Problem.
Collective nouns are nouns, which describe a group of nouns with the same characteristics. Many of them are neuter, e.g. das Obst (fruit), das Gemüse (vegetable), das Fleisch (meat), das Gebirge (mountain range), das Geschirr (tableware), das Besteck (cutlery), das Gebäck (pastry), das Gebiet (territory), das Gebiss (set of teeth), das Geflügel (poultry), das Gehirn (brain), das Gelände (terrain), das Gerät (device), das Geschlecht (gender), das Getreide (grain). Note that most of them start with the prefix Ge– , and often you can still see their provenience. For example, in ‘Gebirge’ you will find ‘Berg’ (mountain), in ‘Gebäck’ the verb ‘backen’ (to bake), in ‘Geflügel’ ‘fliegen’ (to fly), and so on.
Most of the nouns deriving from a verb and adding –t are feminine, e.g. die Fahrt (journey), die Ankunft (arrival) – ankommen (to arrive), die Furcht (fear) – fürchten (to fear), die Schrift (writing) – schreiben (to write), die Geburt (birth) – gebären (to give birth), die Macht (power), die Sicht (view) – sehen (to see).
It is a bit risky to make general observations about the gender of German nouns. However, someone claims that 46% of all nouns are feminine, 34% are masculine, and 20% are neuter. If this is true, a good guess could be to go for the feminine. However, most of the 46% seems to be covered by the ‚die -e’ rule (e.g. die Lampe) and the list above (e.g. die Hoffnung). It seems that apart from these two groups of feminine nouns most of the things of our everyday life are not feminine, like der Stuhl, der Tisch, das Bett, das Haus, das Buch.
Then keep in mind that you get the gender of a whole bunch of words for free, compound words or words with a prefix. We got die Fahrt – die Abfahrt – die Zugfahrt. Once you know the gender of Fahrt, the other ones follow immediately. German is famous for its long words, which actually are not long, but just composed of different nouns. So, don’t get caught in a trap by words like ‘Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz’ (somebody claims it would be the longest German word), because you just have to split it up and you are fine. The last noun is the important word, which is Gesetz (law), which also gives the article: das Gesetz. All right?
Of course, there is still a huge amount of words for which we can’t find any kind of rule. There are only two ways: either studying or getting used to it by the time.
Some thoughts about language 