Hello everyone,
And welcome to a a very special episode, because today, I actually have a guest.
A while back someone sent me a really interesting email. His day name is Emmanuel Haton, but I’ll refer to him with his secret identity…. Excel-Man.
He had done some serious number crunching on German noun gender and I found his work so interesting that I absolutely had to share that with you.
Using a giant database of German nouns and their usage frequency, Excel-Man used his superpower to check for trends between endings and gender and calculated how accurate this rule of thumb is if you just follow it blindly.
And he didn’t stop there.
Then, he collected the most common exceptions to the particular rule of thumb and then calculated the accuracy again. And it’s all weighted by frequency, mind you. So if 99 of 100 words follow a certain pattern but that one exception is super common, it’ll increase the accuracy quite a bit.
And to top it all off, it even accounts for compounds. So if die Sicht was an exception for instance, its frequency would also include words like Einsicht and Aussicht and so on.
He used the DeReWo frequency database of the Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, which contains abou 23,000 singular nouns and which is based on a collection of recent German texts totalling 23 billion words. That’s thousands and thousands of words.
So it’s a pretty damn nice insight into regularities and how regular they are and all in all an incredible piece of work and I’m gonna share part of his email and the tables with you below.
Not all of it is equally useful in practice, but I’m sure you’ll find some really nice ideas and insights. And it’s generally just very interesting to see how accurate these trends really are.
So… take a look and then tell me what you think. I’m really really curious for your feedback and if you can use this for your studies.
And without further ado, I’ll now pass on the .. uhm… mic to Excel Man.
***
German Noun Gender and Big Data
(by Excel-Man)
I looked into the question of noun gender in German. I know, for a native speaker, this is a most uninteresting topic. But that’s only because you’ve been immersed all along in the language and therefore gender is obvious. Not so for a foreign learner, for whom it is something of an enigma and a holy grail. And for a language perfectionist like me it is a tragedy: I can easily umsonst walk by a bakery if I can’t remember the correct gender for Kuchen…
I decided to have a go at it, not from a semantic point of view (meaning: babies, diminutives and young animals are neutral; days, months and seasons are masculine, etc.) but using another ally… drumroll…
BIG DATA
Ok, really simply statistics. Ok, really some analysis in an excel table. My hope was to find some useable rules, and I did find some. As always in languages, few rules are valid 100% of the time but I found out some regularities that can save the day with a pretty good success rate.
Also I made sure to consider frequency data. I have read that overall in the German vocabulary the percentage of masculine/ feminine words is such and such, which can help make some “bets” when you don’t know the gender of a word. But, to be useable, this kind of tip needs to be based on the usage frequency of the words, not only on their raw number.
Ideally usage frequency of spoken German should be considered, because rules of thumb are much more useful when speaking, as you don’t have the possibility to open a dictionary and check. Unfortunately I couldn’t get my hands on any such spoken word frequency database. Instead I relied on the general DeReWo database from the Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache.
The results
Some known things were confirmed:
- words in -UNG are feminine except der Sprung
- words in -ION are mostly feminine
- ,,,.
But there were also some less obvious things, like for instance about the gender of words that end in -r
The gender of words ending in -R
For some reason the R final sounds masculine to me but it’s not exactly true.
First of all, let’s be semantic one second, if the -R word designates a feminine person (die Mutter) or a masculine person (der Bauer) then go for the person’s gender.
The exception is das Opfer and I remember it by thinking that the Opfer doesn’t actually do something. Similarly, devices that do something (der Computer) are masculine.
– otherwise -AUER is always feminine
– other words ending in -ER are, to my surprise, more often neutral (das Meer, das Messer) except if the first letter is K – in that case, go for masculine (der Koffer).
– words ending in -UR and -HR are mostly feminine but for some exceptions, including das Jahr,
– for other -R words (that is, not ending in -ER), try masculine and you’ll be right 78% of the time.
Words ending with I
- words ending with “-ei” are overwhelmingly feminine
- other words in -i are 95% masculine.
- Words ending in -f, -b, -g(except -ung) are 90% masculine
- Words ending in -us, -uss, -uß (except das Haus) are 90% masculine.
Easy to remember when thinking that -us is the typical masculine marker in Latin. - Similarly, words in -um (the typical Latin marker for neutral) are indeed almost all neutral except for…
- …those in –aum, which are masculine.
For more statistical data, see results in tables A and B below. In every case you can see that learning a few exceptions seriously increases the probability of guessing right.
Finally, usage statistics let us know the list of words that are so frequent, including the frequency of their compounds, that it is worth learning their gender by heart (see table C).
Conclusion: doing this analysis was slightly geeky but fun. In total, the situations described here cover over 70% of the usage.
Enough to make me feel safer when ordering einen Kuchen at the bakery. And yes, it is der Kuchen.
** if you’re reading on mobile, please flip to landscape!! The full tables should fit then **
Table A
Gender of nouns in -R
(in total, 16% of all word occurrences, so these words make up 16% of the total nouns used)
| ending: | trend: | accuracy: | extras: | accuracy with extras: |
| -er and is a feminine (Mutter) or masculine person (Bauer) | f/m | 99% | das Opfer | 100% |
| -er and a device that does something, or a month | m | 97% | das Thermometer (and other “meter” devices), die Leiter | 99% |
| -auer (if not a masculine person) | f | 100% | ||
| begins by K- | m | 91% | das Klavier, die Kammer, das Kloster | 100% |
| other words in -er | n | 58% | der Fehler, der Meter, der Liter der Ärger, der Hunger, der Finger die Nummer, die Steuer, die Feier | 80% |
| -hr or -ur | f | 67% | das Jahr das Ohr, das Rohr,der Verkehr, der Schwur, der Azur | 100% |
| other words ending in -r | m | 78% | das Tor, das Paar, das Haar, die Tür, die Bar, die Schar | 94% |
Table B
Other noun gender rules
| when a noun ends with: | if you say: | then you are x% right | and if you learn these exceptions: | then you are x% right | (this rule covers x% of total noun occurrences) |
| -ung | f | 99% | der Sprung | 100% | 9.2% |
| -ion | f | 98% | der Champion, der Spion, der Skorpion, das Stadion, das Ion | 100% | 2.3% |
| -eit | f | 98% | der Streit | 100% | 2.7% |
| -ft | f | 94% | der Saft, der Lift, der Stift, das Geschäft, das Heft, der Schaft (but other words in -schaft are f | 99% | 1.7% |
| -e (except if a masculine person) | f | 90% | das Ende, das Interesse, das Gebäude, das Gelände, das Finale, das Auge, der Name, der Kaffee, der Schnee, der Käse | 97% | .4% |
| -nn | m | 98% | das Kinn, das Zinn | 99% | 0.7% |
| -g | m | 91% | die Burg, das Zeug, das XXX-ing | 99% | 2.9% |
| -pf | m | 99% | das Geschöpf | 100% | 0.3% |
| -ik | f | 99% | der Streik, das Mosaik | 100% | 1.0% |
| -b | m | 89% | das Lob, das Grab, das Weib, das Pub, das Kalb, das Verb, das Laub | 99% | 0.4% |
| -f | m | 88% | der/das Golf, der /die Elf, das Schaf, das Schiff, das Dorf, das Kaff | 99% | 1.4% |
| -tz | m | 89% | das XXX-etz | 99% | 1.3% |
| -nz | f | 90% | der Tanz, der Schwanz, der Glanz, der Kranz | 99% | 0.5% |
| -us, -uss, -uß (except das Haus) | m | 92% | die Nuss, das Muß, das Plus, das Minus, das Virus, das Aus | 98% | 1.0% |
| words in UM | |||||
| -aum | m | 100% | 0.3% | ||
| other words in -um | n | 97% | der Konsum, der Irrtum, der Reichtum | 100% | 0.9% |
| words in -is | |||||
| -nis | n | 86% | der Penis die Kenntnis, die Erlaubnis | 96% | 0.5% |
| -eis | m | 94% | das Eis, das Gleis | 99% | 0.5% |
| other words in -is | f | 77% | das Remis, das Palais der Mais, der Cannabis, der Kurbis | 95% | 0.1% |
| words in “-i” | |||||
| -ei | f | 98% | der Schrei, der Papagei, der Brei , das Geschrei | 100% | 0.6% |
| other words in -i | m | 95% | die Safari, die Salami, die Gaudi das Taxi, das Alibi, das Sushi, das Müsli | 99% | 0.8% |
Table C
Frequent nouns worth learning by heart
The frequency includes the frequency of the compound words with the same root.
| der Tag | 1.8% |
| die Xxx-schaft (but der Schaft ) | 1.1% |
| das Jahr | 1.0% |
| die Zeit | 0.8% |
| die Stadt | 0.6% |
| der Euro | 0.6% |
| das Ende | 0.5% |
| das Spiel | 0.5% |
| der Fall | 0.5% |
| das Haus | 0.5% |
| der Platz | 0.4% |
| der Xxx-trag | 0.4% |
| der Satz | 0.4% |
| die Arbeit | 0.4% |
| der Punkt | 0.3% |
| das Land | 0.3% |
| der Meter (the unit, but das Thermometer ) | 0.3% |
| der Bau | 0.3% |
| das Leben | 0.3% |
| die Welt | 0.3% |
| der Gang | 0.3% |
| der Artikel | 0.3% |
| der Rat | 0.3% |
| der Ort | 0.3% |
| der Weg | 0.2% |
| das Geld | 0.2% |
| die Sicht | 0.2% |
| das Unternehmen | 0.2% |
| der Grund | 0.2% |
| der Schluss | 0.2% |
| das Bild | 0.2% |
| das Thema | 0.2% |
| der Abend | 0.2% |
| die Wahl | 0.2% |
| die Zahl | 0.2% |
| das Mal | 0.2% |
| der Kreis | 0.2% |
| der Zug | 0.2% |
| das Amt | 0.2% |
| das Werk | 0.2% |
| die Form | 0.2% |
| der Raum | 0.2% |
| das Wort (but die Antwort ) | 0.2% |
***
Let us know what you think and of course also if you have any questions.
See you in the comments :)
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Hi
Is there any reason why “-us, -uss, -uß” row has “das Haus” mentioned in the first column instead of the 4th column with other exceptions?
Good question, no I don’t think there is. I just copied these tables from the person who did the analysis and I didn’t catch that detail, but I can’t think of any particular reason that would make sense.
After some thinking, maybe Haus is so frequent that moving it to the exceptions would lower the base accuracy too much and make the rule less appealing than it actually is?
Regarding 100% with exceptions… I’ve found some exceptions :-)
-hr or -ur : der Flur (“corridor”, but there is “die” too – “farmland”), Friseur, Lemur, Ingenieur, Saboteur, Zentaur
-ung : der Schwung
-ion : der Lampion, Orion
-ik : der Sputnik, das Arsenik
-ei: das Ei (if a word doesn’t count as its own ending, than this can be moved to -i below)
And for 99% with exceptions, these seem quite frequent:
-ft : der Duft
-i : die Peperoni, das Emoji, Ei
Really helpful, and interesting at the same time. As frequent words usually occur in (I think) frequent contexts, eg nachtes Jahr, an diesem Tag, it could be even more useful to add phrases to be learned by heart?
Possibly yes, but my hunch is that a list of “common phrases” would get very long very quickly.
“am Tag” is a good one to learn, I think as it has the Dative “built in”, but “an dem Tag” and “an diesem Tag” could be ones that you can build on the fly based on “am Tag”.
But I’m just personally not a fan of phrase based learning. I like learning isolated words, but everyone is different about that and some people absolutely need phrases.
OK then I’ll make my own list of phrases that often come to mind to me in English (and in German). It will be interesting to compare the nouns in them, especially for their frequency and oddity (ie not sitting within the overall pattern). I agree that just learning lists of phrases without any analysis is not very inspiring.
Die Kirche? Nevermind I can’t read
ist ‘großartig’ in der Umgangssprache tatsächlich häufig, oder nur bei Cari und Manuel?
Hmm, das hängt glaub ich vom Sprecher ab. Ich verwende es nie. Es ist mir einfach zu lang. Aber Cari sagt das wirklich oft, auch privat.
This reminds me of a couple Linguistics courses I took in university. Thanks for doing it, very useful! ;)
Corpus linguistics can be intense :D
Is there a link to the Excel worksheet? That would be really helpful.
okuk
?
Hi Emmanuel
The last table is not well fitted for PC, the second column allows one digit instead three (which is needed)
Besides that, this post is amazing I will share from now on to all german learners :)
Oh damn… formatting html tables is such a nightmare. I fixed it now, I think :). Thanks for the heads up.
Der Schung is another exception
What’s “Schung”?
Possibly meant “der Schwung”
Ah yes, that makes sense :)
How interesting. As 53% of German words are feminine, I learned the endings that are mostly f. I pick up the rest as I go: busk it as m or n.
I think that’s a pretty good approach actually… gets you very far with comparatively little effort.
Maybe I should make a meta analysis of which 5 ending rules cover most verbs and then recommend learning those and leave the rest up to time.
My comments is nowhere to be found. Let me repeat then; words such as Schrei or Sprung do not have an ending which is something that is reserved for multisyllabic words. Ei and ung are part of the stem of the word here therefore you cannot derive their gender based on an ending syllable that does not exist. We don’t say in English that the word jump has en ending in ump or mp etc.
Your comment is online, and my answer as well :).
https://yourdailygerman.com/german-gender-statistics/#comment-54232
I just try to learn the article with the noun, because that was stressed by the online programs early on. I will try to look over all this information, but there is no foolproof way to learn German definite articles. The feminine ones I usually get right, but the masculine and neuter ones I sometimes forget. I practice definite articles every day (with three different subscription programs), and I always get a few wrong no matter how much I study them.
Just going to keep trying…
;)
Thanks so much, super useful.
I do have one more adjustment to your English – “it’s all weighed by frequency”: “weighed” should be “weighted”. That’s the correct term in statistical analysis.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/weightedaverage.asp
Edit – am I doing something wrong? I tried to download the .pdf, but only got part of the article. It stops part way through Table B.
Uff, damn pdf. I didn’t see that. The pdf creator software I am using is starting to get a little old. I thought it was only in the backend so far, but seems like something in the article makes it stop.
I don’t know what it is though. I tried recreating, but it didn’t change anything.
Do you have a browser pdf option maybe?
Okay, I think it’s actually an issue with the html tables I am using. Something similar happened last time, the pdf just stop in the middle of a table.
I need to look for a new software :/
have i just noticed or was there time references under messages all the time?! i tried a few articles and it is same in all messages. although i said it would be better with dates, your argument for not putting also seems valid. anyway now people can say their opinion about both styles.
I actually turned that on after these comments here, just to see how I feel about it :). I’m not gonna put it on the posts for now, though. Maybe if I find a way to show “edit” date.
Interesting stuff. I would be curious to poke around in the data and dig into some of the finer details, like how many words are in each category, what the frequency looks like, how many words are compound. From poking around on dict.cc for words that end in *auer, it looks like you can have pretty much everything you need for daily use if you learn 3 words – Bauer (m), Dauer (f), Mauer (f). I picked a small category on purpose because it’s easy to look at, but I still thought it was interesting.
Another thought, there are obviously strong trends based on the form of the word (which is a huge help when you know what the word looks like but don’t know the meaning), but I wonder how many of the exceptions could be explained from the meaning of the word. For nouns ending in -nis, it seems like they tend to be neuter if they describe something concrete, or at least with a tangible aspect, and feminine for more abstract ideas. Erkenntnis, Kenntnis (f); Ergebnis, Verhältnis (n). It’s more of a broad trend than anything else, and it breaks down at some point, but I did find a fair amount of research about abstract nouns tending to be feminine. I have some other theories about how to explain the gender split for -nis nouns (that could possibly apply to other nouns), but that’s a bit too much for a comment. How useful any of this is for daily learning, I don’t know, but this is what I end up doing when I have nowhere to go.
i’d like to thank you for your free-membership gift that allows me to get into this massive amount of pretty good thinking approachs in learning germany and languages in general
i’ll pay that back as soon as i can … what a decent person you are!
thank you again
but where could i find the date of each article … seem to be unchronicled
yeah, though i just love this blog, thats a concern for me too. i am surprised that most people doesnt seem to care about it at all. without date it feels like i am floating in a space of articles without any point of reference. it is as if; it werent for the emails that Emanuel sends weekly one could easily assume that this blog had stopped years ago and we are just lingering in a museum of old entries. i dont mean “old” is bad, just that without reference it feels kind of weird. i dont know, maybe i am the weird :) then again, maybe this “weirdness” is what makes this blog special. because there is really something different about this blog that makes it stand out among other tons of similar websites. sure it is due to emanuels übermensch dedication and courtesy but maybe this date thing also adds a unique flavor.
But the reality is that most articles ARE old. I post once per week so most of the stuff is older than a year.
The reason I removed the date is that it discourages people from commenting on old stuff because they think it’s old.
But the information doesn’t change over time. So it doesn’t really matter when an article was published.
If you need a time line, you can find it in the “vocabulary – by date” archive. There, you have ALL articles in sequence.
I get your point that it’s unusual to not see when something was published. But I think not having it there has more benifits that having it there, especially since I am updating old articles at the moment.
Mein Gott. Es ist sehr gute Informationen. Vielen Dank, dass Sie mich es wissen lassen.
Sehr gerne :).
KLeine Anmerkung: “mich wissen lassen” is a bit formal and you’d mostly use it in context of little work memos.
Wow. Very nice! Concerning words like computer. My experience is, that you look at the gender of the German word.
Auf Deutsch heißen diese Wörter Anglizismen.
Example:
Der Computer – > der Rechner
Das Notebook – > das Notizbuch
Die E-Mail – > could be based on “die Post”
There could be exceptions. I haven’t spend much time looking for them.
Yeah, there are other factors that can influence which way a loan word goes but having a German counterpart is a big part of it.
But we’re not always of one mind. There’s “der” and “das” for Laptop, for example. “das” sounds awful for me, but for others it’s the right form.
Am I the only one who got surprised by this article? I have searched all internet to see such a compilation but could not find it. This is useful not only for learners but also for teachers.
Thank you. Really nice work
Not my work, just to make sure. I hope Excel-Man reads the comments :)
Like many of your posts, I printed this one out. They’re great! However, the absence of a pdf version in this case does make for inconvenience: ie having to hand-write the text obscured by the Privacy and Cookies message at the bottom of each page..
Hang in there: the button for the pdf version often magically emerges after Elsa’s typos have been seen to.
Hahahaha… you just graduated to “true YDG veteran”