DaF-Blog

Die, der or das?

17. November 2005

Every german noun has a gender. The gender is purely grammatical and may differ from the natural sex. For instance „das Mädchen“ denotes a girl, i.e. a female person, but the article is neutral and not feminine.

For some nouns you can derive or guess the gender but I recommend to learn nouns always with the article in the nominative case.

Genusinformationen in Wörterbüchern
In an earlier post I wrote about a method to learn the articles by heart. In this post I will concentrate on how you can find information about gender in a dictionary.

There are three main possiblities to indicate gender information:

Full article in nominative case:
die Schule, der Lehrer, das Klassenzimmer
An abbreviation of the article. The article is abbreviated by its last letter, i.e. : e = die, r = der, s = das:
e Schule, r Lehrer, s Klassenzimmer
The name of the gender is abbreviated. There are both German and Latin names. They are : männlich/maskulin (article der), weiblich/feminin (article die) und sächlich/neutral (article das):
Schule (f.), Lehrer (m.), Klassenzimmer (n.) or Schule (w.), Lehrer (m.), Klassenzimmer (s.)
The Latin names are more common nowadays.

Canoo
If you want to look up an article on-line I recommend Canoo . Enter the noun into the search field, hit „Suchen“ (search) and select the link „Flexion“ (inflection). Canoo will then display a table with the noun (and the corresponding articles) in all four cases for you. Canoo can even give you the articles of many compounds which a normal dictionary doesn’t list. This is a big advantage.
One other useful tip: When you have searched for a noun with Leo, click the G on the results page. It will bring you directly to the corresponding table of canoo.

How important are the articles?
Native speakers hardly make mistakes regarding the articles. Nevertheless most sentences are perfectly understandable even though they contain some faulty articles. My piece of advice: Lean them whenever you learn a new noun. But don’t bother too much about articles when speaking. Your partner will forgive you some mistakes concerning articles, but is unlikely to wait 5 minutes for each sentence you plan to utter. When writing you have more time to think and to revise. That is why a lot of people expect a higher degree of correctness in written texts. If you are not sure about the gender look it up in a dictionary. Canoo is just one possiblity.