{"id":89,"date":"2005-11-17T15:13:52","date_gmt":"2005-11-17T14:13:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cornelia.siteware.ch\/blog\/wordpress\/?p=89"},"modified":"2009-09-13T20:16:18","modified_gmt":"2009-09-13T19:16:18","slug":"die-der-or-das","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cornelia.siteware.ch\/blog\/wordpress\/2005\/11\/17\/die-der-or-das","title":{"rendered":"Die, der or das?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every german noun has a gender<\/strong>. The gender is purely grammatical and may differ from the natural sex. For instance „das M\u00e4dchen“ denotes a girl, i.e. a female person, but the article is neutral and not<\/strong> feminine. <\/p>\n

For some nouns you can derive or guess the gender<\/a> but I recommend to learn nouns always with the article in the nominative case. <\/p>\n

Genusinformationen in W\u00f6rterb\u00fcchern<\/strong>
\nIn an earlier post I wrote about a method to learn the articles<\/a> by heart. In this post I will concentrate on how you can find information about gender in a dictionary. <\/p>\n

There are three main possiblities to indicate gender information: <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Full article in nominative case:
    \n die Schule, der Lehrer, das Klassenzimmer <\/li>\n
  2. An abbreviation of the article. The article is abbreviated by its last letter, i.e. : e = die<\/strong>, r = der<\/strong>, s = das<\/strong>:
    \ne Schule, r Lehrer, s Klassenzimmer <\/li>\n
  3. The name of the gender is abbreviated. There are both German and Latin names. They are : m\u00e4nnlich\/maskulin (article der), weiblich\/feminin (article die) und s\u00e4chlich\/neutral (article das):
    \nSchule (f.), Lehrer (m.), Klassenzimmer (n.) or Schule (w.), Lehrer (m.), Klassenzimmer (s.)
    \nThe Latin names are more common nowadays.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Canoo<\/strong>
    \nIf you want to look up an article on-line I recommend     Canoo <\/a>. 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.
    \nOne other useful tip: When you have searched for a noun with     Leo<\/a>, click the G on the results page. It will bring you directly to the corresponding table of canoo. <\/p>\n


    \nHow important are the articles?<\/strong>
    \nNative speakers hardly make mistakes regarding the articles. Nevertheless most sentences are perfectly understandable even though they contain some faulty articles. My piece of advice<\/strong>: Lean them whenever you learn a new noun. But don’t bother too much about articles when speaking<\/strong>. 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<\/strong> 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    In German, every noun has a gender. The gender determines which articles have to be used. There are several ways to indicate this information in a dictionary. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,3,4],"tags":[157,18,17],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cornelia.siteware.ch\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cornelia.siteware.ch\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cornelia.siteware.ch\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cornelia.siteware.ch\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cornelia.siteware.ch\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/cornelia.siteware.ch\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1341,"href":"http:\/\/cornelia.siteware.ch\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions\/1341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cornelia.siteware.ch\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cornelia.siteware.ch\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cornelia.siteware.ch\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}