German
at Rutgers Camden
German
at Rutgers Camden
| > | The Problem
The gender of nouns is one of the most irritating problems that English-speakers face in learning German. It is as bewildering for the foreigner as it is obvious for the native speaker that the table is masculine, the window is neuter, and the door is feminine. The problem appears all the more daunting to English-speakers, because although English has the same three genders as German, English grammatical gender almost always corresponds to biological or natural gender (except for a few oddities like refering to a ship as "she"). Learners are usually told to simply memorize the gender of each noun as they learn it, and this is certainly good advice. However, German does not assign gender to nouns in a totally random way, and a number of rules do exist that can make gender more managable for the foreign learner. Types of rules
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