With the comprehensive way to learn the language should I giva an extra attention to the artikel or they will stuck to the memory during the process?
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Iâm a sceptic with regards to comprehensible input as described by Stephen Krashen, though large amounts of input are needed. I find I need to pay attention to each word, and memorise the word, the gender and the plural form. However, there are many ways to learn, and you need to find the way that works for you. Experiment, if a method works, use it, if not, try another.
German genders donât follow strict rules, even if there are some reoccouring patterns. You will probably have a hard time if you try to brute force them into your brain if you are still at a beginner level, so it is probably good to focus more on building vocabulary. It makes sense to see if you can watch those patterns and may even be worth looking them up in a grammar book. Not to memorize them, but to grow some awareness so you can easier get a hang on it.
Once you reached a higher level you should be able to get the gender right, though, as you will otherwise struggle with longer sentences, where the gender is used to differentiate between different objects, for example. It also sounds very odd to a native speaker if you get them wrong regularly, like a child. So you just have to see how your skill in that regards develop and if you notice that while your language proficiency improves this aspect doesnât, you should start to pay more attention to it.
Native speakers donât actively learn the genders, so I guess on the long run you can learn them via the âcomprehensiveâ way. However, native speakers have tons of input, and parents and teachers correcting them all the time. So they donât need to be efficient in learning the language, something that you might want to be.
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One nice feature of German is that the gender of a noun appears to be determined by the gender of the rightmost semantic component i.e. a part that carries a meaning. Thus der Teil, der Vorteil, der Nachteil. der Zug, der Aufzug and so on. Once you know the gender of the end part, youâre sorted. Whilst my experience of German is limited, German genders seem to be much easier than French genders which seem to embody the gallic shrug.
Krashenâs comprehensible input theory requires massive amounts of input. Itâs very inefficient. Explicit learning is often preferable.
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I agree with what @LeifGoodwin says about comprehensible input alone being very inefficient.
For instance, I find flashcard and fill-in-the-blank-style quiz activities very helpful for gender recall. For this, I use tools other than LingQ.
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Das Teil. (Itâs also das Abteil)
You are generally right, though, that if a word gets a prefix added the gender usually doesnât change.
As said, there are some patterns. But there are so many different forms that memorizing them is not something I would suggest when starting the language. Paying attention to it makes sense, nevertheless.
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Those articles didnât stick in my memory at all. In my case, following the CI concept led to a situation where I knew all the words but not their gender. I believe this is because we donât need genders to understand the message, so our brain optimizes and just ignores them completely. I repeat, this was my experience.
Later, when I started speaking, I had to pay the price for this. Iâve made it a rule that all nouns in German start with the letter âdâ. Additionally, I force myself to notice all the declensions in each sentenceâwho did what to whom, and so on.
The funny thing is that I made this mistake before, with articles in English. In my native language, we donât use them at all, and they arenât essential for comprehension either. So when I started speaking English, my sentences were like, âI see squirrel on tree.â
So, the moral of the story is: find your weak spots early.
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I admit I had to look this up, I bet Iâll get it wrong somewhere.
der Teil is for an abstract part, a part of a theory say, whereas das Teil is a concrete or physical part, such as a part of an engine or a country. Thus der Vorteil as the noun is an abstraction, and das Abteil as the noun is a physical object i.e. compartment in a physical object. Over to a native German speaker to correct this âŚ
I just think learning methodology depends on the learner. People talk about comprehensible input, they rarely talk about noticing, I have to focus on noticing.
That is one weakness in the Krashen model, language contains redundancy, and as you say, we can understand a message without noticing all of the content e.g. a gender or a noun case. And yes, some people might notice everything, but not me either.
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You are correct, I didnât think of the first possibility when I read your post, mea culpa.
No objections here. Noticing structures or patterns or whatever you may wanna call it is important, too. To a certain degree we might due this unconsciously, but I always considered this inefficient. Thatâs why, for example, I spend some of my time working through grammar books. I donât memorize what I read there, but it helps me to recognize grammatical patterns when I encounter them.
I always try to pay attention to how certain things are done in a language compared to how they are done in German or English, and whether words that share a common aspect in grammatical function or semantics also share something common in the wording, which they usually do. Doing so helps a lot when trying to make assumptions on the meaning of a newly encountered word. It also helps to differentiate between the semantical and the grammatical part of a word, especially in highly agglutanive languages. I wouldnât neccessarely sort German into this category, but compared to English it probably is pretty agglutanive, and if you want to determine the gender by its semantical component as you suggested, you obviously need to know what the semantical component of the word is.
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Hi @LeifGoodwin @gmeyer , I do agree with you, I use this approach with enhancements, like Explicit study for the outcome after consuming a specific material and also SRS to reactivate what I have learned before.
but I still find the Article part are overwhelming and not effective as well, with thousands of nouns in a short period of time, it is not possible for me to remember der die das, especially the same der die das are changeable based on the Grammar case, it could be memorized only for high frequent words
So I just decided to not burn more efforts on them , and focus on the other parts, so my question would it be fixed in the future, or I have to slowdown to consider them again?
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This what Iâm doeing now, Iâm in B2 level or working on it now, but in Genders Iâm still in A2
In spoken you can work around it like what @SergeyFM did, by adding too fast"d" before any noun and no one will will notice what you really said 
but you canât do it in written.
The problem is the semantical part of the words ar not small, and still overwhelming to memorise it,
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CI concept stands for what? Continuous Input?
Was it fixable ? after ignoring them and start to speak, was it easier to catch them and fix the patterns, or was it better to build them from the beginning?
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First, by adding âd,â I meant that I consider all nouns in German to start with âdâ (e.g., die squirrel, der tree).
Second, about fixing the mess, I regretted not addressing it early on â in both cases.
Iâm generally against outputting too early, but some form of sentence generation is necessary.
Currently, I like what Duolingo allows you to do: it says a sentence to you, and you assemble it from the words provided. I believe this is a perfect intermediate step before transitioning to full output, as it helps you notice all the grammatical details and sentence structure.
As for genders, it is very important to remember words in the context of their gender. It honestly annoys me to death to have to look them up so often.
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Great observation. I anecdotally suspect too that a weakness of comprehensible input concerns difficulty in self-awareness of aspects of redundancy in the acquired language that are not present or as significant in the mother tongue.
One can acquire much of a language without learning the redundancies. As natural selection is what causes adaptation, perhaps itâs similar with language acquisition where this is the driving force of analytical drift as transition from synthetic to analytic. Personally, I would be surprised that the blind side is common more so with native speakers of analytic languages learn more synthetic ones.
For me, coming from English, a related Germanic language that has nearly completely lost all remnants of the case system, perhaps this is related to why I find it effective to learn the articles of nouns, rather than acquire them.
Even as a lay person, I find a lot of Krashenâs work rather superficial, especially given linguistic aspects and diversity.
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In my humble opinion, not only should you learn the articles but also the plural form of each word. German plurals are a difficult and challenging task to master. Like you, I study German because, as you noted, words, expressions, grammar, and so on donât stay in my mind only after reading and listening.
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There are some good patterns you should try to learn at some point (earlier may be better, but I havenât done that myself!):
German Gender Rules: Masculine, Feminine, or Neuter (thoughtco.com)
The Ultimate Guide to Der, Die and Das | FluentU Language Learning
I thought there was an article I had that actually looked at percentages, but Iâm not finding it. If you are interested in that, Hammerâs German Grammar and Usage has ALL the patterns and many of the exceptions to the rules.
You can make lists of words for the patterns probably and just drill them. Thereâs an app out there too thatâs called der die das (might be several of these) where you could practice and drill these if you desire.
There are many to me that Iâve just learned from input (you asked earlier about CIâŚthat is comprehensible input). Many of these you see more used with certain prepositions which will also dictate the case. âauf dem Tischâ, âzum Flughafenâ. Many of these everyday type ones may be just better learned through patterns when used âafter the verbâ. Otherwise youâre trying to think backwardsâŚânow is this one a die, der, das? and then what do I do after this preposition or verb preposition combination, is it accusitive, dative blah blah?â Those are think are a bit too hard I think to think backwards and they are a little harder to learn with the noun, because they could be different for different situations for that noun based on the preposition or verb.
i.e. think of cases where you would say âon theâ for a certain noun. Or âwithâ or âto theâ and drill those with the preposition.
I personally havenât worried too much about the articles as of yet, other than what Iâve learned from input. However, I am at a stage where Iâm starting to try and speak more and I do find it sometimes a sticking point in my head. So I will be starting to focuse more on the patterns and potentially drill them. I wonât worry too much if I get them wrong in real life situation, but it is something Iâd like to improve.
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Super danke, fĂźr der die das App, I think this will help a lot, I know about the Gender rules, but I thought this is not easy to be remembered during the speeking, I will give them a try
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During speakingâŚno it may not be unless youâve trained it. i.e. It might be good to grab a list of nouns that exhibit the pattern, and just get used to the article to the pattern to where it doesnât take much thinking. i.e. -heit ending = die . Initially you may need to think about it for a couple of seconds, but if you look at enough of these it will just start to sound right meaning youâre not thinking about it at all anymore.
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With reading and/or listening alone, youâll only learn the gender of the occasional noun. Youâll intuitively pick up a few ârulesâ here and there, but as others have mentioned, you simply wonât learn the gender of most nouns through input alone. You just donât pay enough attention to learn it. You have to actively speak, write, and test yourself with feedback in a very specific way to rote learn them. If you use something like Anki or some other rote learning technique for the most frequent 500 or 1,000 nouns to learn their gender (and ideally plural form, as they are also semi-irregular), youâll know the gender of many more nouns, as per the rule @LeifGoodwin mentioned, that is, adding prefixes and making composite nouns generally retains the gender of the right-most noun.
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