Hello everyone,
And welcome back. I hope you’re doing great, ich hoffe euch geht’s super.
Last week, I introduced you to the German Declension Diamond, a special kind of declension chart a fellow reader came up with.
And I also soft-ranted a bit about the lack of innovation on the side of the German Teacho-Industrial-Complexe with its ever-the-same, tired old approaches to things.
Well, apparently that triggered my subconscious somehow or something, because a few days later, I had an idea:
A new way to practice the German noun gender
Well, maybe it does exist, but I haven’t seen it anywhere, and I think it might be more efficient than the “traditional” method.
Today, I’ll explain my idea to you and my thinking behind it and then we’ll give it a short trial, so you can tell me what YOU think about it and if it’s possibly helpful.
Because newness just for the sake of newness is worthless. It needs to be better.
So if you’re ready, let’s jump right in.
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thanks for the interesting perspective as always
a typo I noticed: “…and then we’ll do a 2 out of 7 and the(N) a few triplets for repetition.”
I hope it’s not annoying. Please let me know if it’s ok I point out typos or not as I go through your archive of articles.
Oh, it’s totally fine :). I wanted to reply to your last comment but couldn’t remember who posted it and where. But it was you, right? The one who’s moving to New York.
oh yes, on the rent vs die Rente article!
I’ve been living in new york (brooklyn) for 2 years now, where my frequency of hearing german in the wild has increased from 1x a year to 1x a month
Ha, I’m jealous!! Enjoy Brooklyn :)
Ich stimme Anja voll und ganz zu. Das Quiz hat mir Spaß gemacht und ich habe dabei viel gelernt. Ich würde sofort ein Lifetime-Abo kaufen, wenn ich dadurch Zugang zu weiteren Quizzen oder einem Tool bekäme.
Bekämst du :)!
https://yourdailygerman.com/verbs-preposition-practice-online/ (Verben mit Präpositionen)
https://yourdailygerman.com/new-tool-german-gender-practice/ (German Cases)
https://yourdailygerman.com/text-comprehension-practice-reading-and-listening/ (Text comprehension, reading+listening)
Das ist bisher die beste Methode, die ich je ausprobiert habe. Viel interessanter und eine wirklich tolle Denkarbeit statt endlosen langweiligen Einzelwörter. Vielen Dank!
Ich mag es. Zuerst bekomme ich 57%, und dann 75%. Ich versuche oft um der Gender zu lernen mit Seedlang. Ich mag es auch! Danke sehr!
Excellent. Useful for any level. I feel to be understood in conversation, the gender is important. Especially using pronouns and prepositions. so much to think about for those of us who don’t learn organically. This was a great cruise the short recap questions just solidified for me.
That was a lot of fun. What an interesting way to refresh or learn the gender. I liked very much that the words repeated themselves. That was very helpful in learning the genders that I did not know before. Thank you once again for your efforts and creativity. I appreciate both.
I loved the format. The repetition of words in different combinations really worked for me. Good idea.
Late to the party but I don’t think students decide to care too much about noun genders by themselves. Instead, teachers care too much about it, and too soon. It’s commonplace to say something in a language course and to have the teacher correct every single mistake you’ve done, including noun genders, even if that’s not what the class was currently working on.
I’m all for correcting every single mistake in written exercises, but in oral exercises, until you’ve reached fluency, it seems like a waste of time to me.
“Instead, teachers care too much about it, and too soon.”
Oh yeah, 100%! This is what I meant, actually. Students wouldn’t really worry as much as they do on their own. But every teacher and textbooks puts so much focus on this early on that everyone starts stressing about it.
And yes, correcting every mistake in a sentence is absolutely pointless. That’s like half a dozen corrections sometimes, each with its own grammar and reasoning. This is pure overwhelm. A teacher has to pick one issue at a time and ignore the rest, kind of. Learners who have a conversation with a native speaker sometimes say “Please correct me if I make a mistake” not realizing that that would completely kill the convo because of just how many mistakes they’re making. In ballet class, you don’t do a position to perfection as a beginner. You do it over and over and refine one issue at a time and you’ll look clumsy for a long time before the swan starts to emerge.
Done. I should point out that I am not a fan of articles in the sense that I don’t pay much attention to them at the moment. I don’t mind making mistakes in that area.
So the exercise was quite difficult for me, but not too boring. Definitely better than traditional exercises. I felt that there were too many words at the beginning, while in the exercises towards the end, with three words, there were perhaps too few. I think four words would be just right for me. My brain didn’t make any connections between the words because it was totally focused on remembering which article sounded best with the word. Perhaps it’s a mechanism that triggers in the native speaker’s brain. There, a list of known words is boring, and the brain makes connections to play. I’m sure I would do the same with Italian words. But in the exercise, my brain is really absorbed in searching for articles and doesn’t think about anything else. Perhaps this is also why I don’t think I memorised any new words, but I think I memorised the gender of some words I already knew.
I would like to add two things: it was extremely useful to receive feedback on the rules during the exercise! Now I know that all words ending in heit and keit have the article die, and I will never forget it! If all the grammar rules were explained during the exercises, it would be a game changer. The brain (at least mine) receives the most information during self-correction during the exercises (unfortunately, this is not the case during conversation).
One last thing: I don’t know if it’s just me, as I don’t formally study word gender, but what my brain does when trying to answer the test is to try to hear how der/die/das sound in front of the word. The hope is that I have unconsciously memorised how that word sounds when native speakers use it. In this regard, even if it seems to complicate things, I think it would be useful to have short sentences ( Der Baum ist schön. ) and not only with the nominative but also with the accusative, for example (Ich kaufe den Baum). For me it would be good to have in the test minimum 2 little sentences where I can “play the articols” to see how they sound.
After all, I think that’s the natural way to learn this stuff, isn’t it? Because native speakers don’t think about the gender and conjugation of articles, they just know that “ich kaufe den Baum” sounds better then “ ich kaufe das Baum”).
Finally, if you are really working on this topic, I would like to remind you of some fantastic advice that came up in the past on this subject. Someone said that he associated each gender with a colour or, even better, something generic like water or fire. So, for each new word, he created (how cool would that be now with GPT?) an image of the word being studied linked to the “gender symbol.”. For example, if masculine (der) is fire, then we would create an image of a burning tree. Obviously, it is more complicated with abstract words. I found this tip very useful for those who, like me, learn very visually. The minimum would be to use colours. Now, when I create my flashcards, I look for images that contain the colour I have associated with the gender. It helps me a lot.
This was my feedback. Thanks for your work!
Going by sound can definitely make sense. It’s a type thing. And you need to have had some exposure of course.
I really love the idea with the elements and using them in a visual, that you mentioned. I didn’t know this approach before, but I feel like it might work really well for me.
IN a way, I think it’d be cooler though if it’s not the AI that comes up with the image, but us ourselves.And then the AI could visualize what we came up with. Or you can brainstorm together how to visualize it, but I wouldn’t want to just drop an image there. This creative part of thinking something up … I feel like that would help with learning a LOT :)
Ja, du hast Recht, es wäre besser, wenn wir es selbst erstellen würden, vielleicht mit einem Text-Bild-ki. Ich glaube, es wäre ziemlich lustig und sehr effektiv, wenn es die Möglichkeit gäbe, es stark zu personalisieren. Jeder könnte das neue Wort/Bild mit seinen eigenen Erinnerungen verknüpfen.
Das kommt bald! 4 Monate. ChatGPT hat schon angefangen, hier und da kleine Mini-Bilder zu kreieren, ohne das man fragt, und ich arbeite auch (bald wieder) an einem Projekt für Deutschlerner in ChatGPT.
Seeing as I just took my C1 test I’m glad I got 100%. But I enjoyed the format for sure!
Oh, good luck for the C1 result then!! I hope the wait is not too crazy long.
Thanks, luckily it’s not that dramatic since I already got B2 last year and I don’t need the certificate specifically for anything. But I’m about to search for jobs and apprenticeships in Germany, so I thought maybe it could be a slight boost.
Oh, I think it will. C1 sounds MUCH better than B2 for some reason. Viel Erfolg!
This helps a great deal. Thanks.
Thank you! So much fun — when will you do more?
11/12. Now I know that it’s die Wut. I like this exercise; it was fun to do, and it taught me one noun gender that I didn’t know, while reinforcing several others that I wasn’t completely sure of.
Awesome, thanks for the feedback! I’m working on making this an actual “thing” and this is really encouraging.
This was fun! Possibly because I got more right than I expected (10 out of 12). I’m A2-ish. A few I knew, but I had to guess or use the rules for most. I also enjoyed the dog in cat’s clothing. I think this has real possibilities. The repetition really helped. I’m going to do it again and hope to do better. Fingers crossed.
And I especially liked “brain’s gonna brain.” Truer words were never said.
12 out of 12!
Nice, really happy to hear that things stuck, though 10/12 initially was already really good!
Ohhh yeah. I think you’re on to something there. I could feel something happening in my brain. I definitely need to do it a few more times.
I find the notion that you can intuit a gender based on other noun’s genders to be interesting given the process that German’s take to gender a new word. The heated debate over das or der laptop comes to mind. Email got the same gender as post. Germans seem to just intuit how a new gender should work based on current related nouns (except for laptop LOL).
First attempt, 6/10. Second one, 10/10 so definitely helpful.
Oh sweet, happy to hear that!
I really did like this way of practice. It felt challenging but not overwhelming. By the end I remembered some of the previous pairings that I did not previously know
Your method here correlates with three learning techniques described in “Make it Stick: the Science of Successful Learning,” (2014), by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel. Those techniques are, 1) TRYING to solve a problem before being shown the solution, 2) INTERLEAVING, q.v. here rolling in words you already know with new words to connect with that old knowledge, and 3) STRUGGLING and applying your active attention to a problem. You are already using another of the techniques in all of your posts, which is frequent TESTING; getting it wrong on a test turns out to be helpful for long-term remembering. The final piece would be SPACING, i.e. coming back to the lesson after a few days to hit it again and drive it deeper into your memory. The time interval is important.
(I got this book in order to help my kids. The authors’ basic theses are that the traditional study method of rereading the text is a waste of time, and that making learning “easy/effortless” may work in the short term, but knowledge gained this way is rapidly forgotten. You have to exert yourself mentally to make it stick. I’m no expert, but it makes sense to me.)
Your work is great. I love this site.
Super encouraging feedback, thanks a lot.
I attended a workshop once in “fighting monkey practice”. It was a physical practice, and among other things we’d do these partner games. For instance, you move a tennis ball around and drop it at a random moment and your partner has to catch it.
And the workshop facilitator said that the goal for the “dropper” is to find the sweet spot where the other person catches about 70% of the time and fails 30 because that’s where we grow. If it’s too easy, we don’t grow. If it’s too hard, most of us get frustrated or overwhelmed. You need both, success and failure in conjunction to progress.
This is brilliant, and you’re absolutely right to think this is something to build upon. I’m unusually (for a native English speaker) good at gender, probably because I just naturally have good recall, but this kind of exercise absolutely hits the “how I learn” sweet spot.
Maybe this is just me, but I suspect not: what’s especially helpful about this format is that you just naturally try out the articles on the words as you go. Like, you see Tafel as one of a group of die-words with one das-word mixed in, and you actually say “die Tafel” in your head (along with all the others). That’s almost worth the cost of admission by itself.
I think in the end, for getting your speaking better, that’s just the key to gender – knowing what article sounds right with a given noun. And I think that’s something a lot of the “pick a gender” kind of exercises don’t let your brain work on.
Very encouraging, thanks for this!!