German for Programmers

Memorizing gender: I hear the trick is not to do it separately ("1. I know the word 'Mädchen'. 2. Its gender is feminine.") but as an integral part of the word ("1. I know the word 'das_Mädchen'.").

Also completely forget the non-grammatical male / female association. Treat it like quarks in physics (up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top): Words with the same name as familiar but mostly unrelated concepts.

Or maybe like "open(2)" vs. "open(3)".

https://linux.die.net/man/2/open

https://linux.die.net/man/3/open

Example: "die Steuer" (tax) vs. "das Steuer" (rudder)

Lots of reading is how my high school English became adequate enough to write a Ph. D. thesis. As soon as I started reading books, the language just clicked. Before that it was just endless amounts of grammar and vocabulary. Also reading something interesting is a bit more engaging than processing endless amounts of meaningless dialogs and other examples from grammar books. The first book you pick up will be a bit of a struggle but that is kind of the point. It gets progressively easier. I remember doing something similar with French and being able to process a simple novel but sadly I never pushed through and I've since forgotten most of my high-school French.

A few tips, for reading. 1) don't use translation dictionaries and instead look up words in the native dictionary. E.g. Merriam Webster is great for English. English words explained in English gives you a good sense of the full context of the word. It's all about getting a sense of context of words and constructs. 2) So, try figuring out things from their context. Language has lots of redundancies and you can sort of skim a sentence and get a rough idea of what it means even if it contains verbs and nouns you have never seen. A fun little exercise is transposing all the verbs in a sentence with something non-sensical like "fu--". Many sentences continue to make way more sense than they should after that. 3) Languages like English, German, Dutch, Swedish, etc. have lots of common roots. This can help you as well. Understanding the etymology of words that look similar across languages can help as well. E.g. English has lots of nautical terms adapted from Dutch, lots of French words that the Normans introduced and quite a bit of viking stuff as well. I actually picked up some Swedish when I was living there a long time ago; enough to be able to process simple Danish and Norwegian as well.

That being said, my German still sucks even after living in Berlin for many years. So do as I say, and not as I do ...

Yea if you are not making an effort to pronounce it formal you'd say

> Ich hab 'nen Rat für dich

> Ich hab 'n Rad für dich

where they sound the same.

> Somehow, they tend to all place the noun in the same gender.

That's not generally true, especially for German. I've heard "der Blog, das Blog," "die, das Email" "die, der, das Factory" … etc.

Loan words undergo an integration process, which is more of a sociolinguistic concept, I guess. At the end of the integration process, the word becomes an integral part of the language, with a fixed gender. For example, "Manager" is integrated, and it's clear its' "der Manager," same for Computer.

Some words do seem to evoke a certain gender (I've never heard anything but "der Podcast") but you shouldn't assume your personal preference extends to all (native) speakers ("das Podcast" would easily be possible.)

But how do people assign gender during the integration process? It's a consensus process, but there are several factors: lexical similarity (Computer denotes the same concept as "der Rechner" so it becomes masculine. Same for City/Stadt (feminine)) or lexical analogies (this loan word denotes something we already have a category for) morphological analogies (words in -er are likely to become masculine, as many German masculine words already have that ending, same for nouns ending in a vowel and feminine.) Sometimes it's chaotic, but that's the nature of consensus.

This process is much easier in Slavic languages, where gender assignment follows stricter morphological rules. German, on the other hand is chaotic. Note: German is not chaotic for the reasons given in TFA, because formations with -chen -keit -heit -ung etc. have fixed, regular gender. But words which did not undergo a morphological derivation process, but are instead atomic nouns are very haphazard in their gender assignment.

It doesn't make sense, but it is a pattern. There is a similar pattern in French: all nouns ending in -tion or -sion are feminine (apart from a single exception: le bastion). Handily we also have most of those nouns in English too.

When learning French I stopped searching for patterns in genders. Some are truly weird, like penis being feminine and vagina being masculine. But I told myself it's no different to having to remember the pronunciation of every single English word, so my brain easily has capacity for it. After a while it becomes just as natural.