5

Recently, while learning German I came across the articles

der, die and das.

which are used to indicate the gender of a noun.

So, categorizing the words into masculine, feminine and neutral does not seem to be straightforward.

What are the rules for categorization?

Em1
  • 38,586
  • 7
  • 91
  • 208
sat
  • 353
  • 1
  • 5
  • 11

4 Answers4

8

There's no rule as far as I know and according to this article about German grammar:

In addition, German assigns gender to nouns without natural gender, in fairly arbitrary fashion. For example, the three common pieces of cutlery all have different genders: das Messer ("knife") is neuter, die Gabel ("fork") is feminine, and der Löffel ("spoon") is masculine.

Also, see this question: How to learn noun genders better?

Gigili
  • 2,146
  • 6
  • 21
  • 37
  • So how people remember about the gender of nouns! Is it only through experience one will be able to identify them perfectly ? – sat May 26 '12 at 19:16
  • @sat The article also gives a rule of thumb, how to determine about 80% of the articles. But be aware that there are exceptions which breaks the rule. – Em1 May 26 '12 at 19:20
  • @sat: See the question I linked to. – Gigili May 26 '12 at 19:21
  • @sat But I've one good news. If you know the article in nominative you can derive the article in the other cases. :) – Em1 May 26 '12 at 19:24
  • @Gigili - Thanks Favorited that article, will help me. – sat May 26 '12 at 19:28
  • 1
    I am native speaker of Hindi that also assigns genders to nouns. I studied the language for 10 years but never came across any rules to help assign gender to nouns but I found that I rarely make a mistake. When non native speakers talk to me I hear a lot of mistakes. But here is the funny part, if I invent a noun and define it, most native speakers will assign it the same gender. I think this phenomenon is worth researching. –  May 27 '12 at 02:59
  • 1
    @MonsterTruck That's called 'Sprachgefühl' (And it's indeed an English word ^^) – Em1 May 27 '12 at 07:50
  • However, there are some uncertainties for some (mostly foreign or artificial) words: der/das Blog, die/das E-Mail, die/das Nutella, der/die/das Joghurt. Some words have (sometimes just slightly) different meanings depending on the article, e.g. der/das Gummi, der/das Teil, der/die Partikel. – Landei May 28 '12 at 12:15
  • @Gigili is right. There are no fixed rules. At least none German speakers know of or follow. All rules you’ll find are most likely from textbooks for learning German and are artificially made up. One more weird example: “Das Mädchen” (the girl) is neutral, even though girls are definitely female – Stefan Haberl Jul 03 '20 at 19:37
1

There are some rules of thumb, but there are so much exceptions of those rules, that the best way is to do what every german native speaker does: Learn for each noun separately what gender it has.

There are even some nouns whos gender depends on the region where you use the word. An example: The english word "plate" is "Teller" in german. In Swizzerland, South Tyrol and southern parts of Germany it is neuter ("das Teller"). In other parts of Germany, in Austria, Luxembourg and in Belgium it is male ("der Teller").

Hubert Schölnast
  • 122,799
  • 17
  • 211
  • 403
  • 2
    But on the other hand, a different gender can also specify a different meaning, as in "der Kiefer" (a bone) vs. "die Kiefer" (a tree) or "der See" (lake) vs. "die See" (sea). And to make it even more complicated, sometimes even the pronounciation can differ: "Der Service" (spoken like the English word "Service", meaning, well, service) vs. "Das Service" (spoken like the French word, meaning a set of plates, cups etc.). – celtschk Jun 12 '12 at 19:06
  • 1
    @celtschk: I would argue, that die Kiefer and there Kiefer are two different nouns, they only happen to be written the same way. – user unknown Jul 03 '20 at 14:22
1

There are many rules which nouns have which gender, based on ending or meaning (there are some exception, but they will give you at least big propability of successfull guess).

An example I've quickly found:

Masculine Nouns

Feminine Nouns

Neutral Nouns

Stepan Vihor
  • 111
  • 3
1

There are very few hard rules, but I think the following don't have exceptions:

  • Words ending in -chen or -lein are always neutral (das Tellerchen, das Mädchen, das Tischlein, das Männlein)
  • Words ending in -heit or -keit are always feminine (die Einheit, die Freundlichkeit, die Heiterkeit, die Traurigkeit)
celtschk
  • 1,604
  • 12
  • 10