Keep Calm & Der, Die, Das!

German Articles at Level A1: 

Teacher- feel free to ask me any questions and doubts.

Student- how do we remember the articles?

German Articles at Level B2:

Teacher- I am here to clear all your doubts 

Student- how do we remember the articles?

A Few Years Later,

Teacher- you speak so well. It seems flawless

Student- that’s fine but how do we remember the articles

Seven years of learning and 5 of teaching and this problem seems unsolvable. People who have learnt German, who are learning it and the ones who have for the love of god ever tried learning it, know what we are talking about. 

Every language is curved and crafted in the most unique and beautiful ways. Some go heavy on grammar, some just a little and make your tongue do jazz, some just allow it to laze around. 

Here we are talking about the most common pain that every German learner suffers from. 

That is ARTICLES. Possibly all the nouns on this planet have a gender, which is presented by an article. 

Through this blog I will share some tricks I used as a student to learn the articles.

1. Accept that you will have to memorise them: as a student it was extremely difficult for me to accept that we must learn the articles, despite hearing it from my teacher 100 times. I always thought there must be a shortcut to reach this destination. 

2. Form word groups: as a beginner it’s a challenge learning the vocabulary and top of that the articles but forming word groups has helped me a lot learn both. 

Eg: you put all the possible nouns under one head. Hangout places. eg. das Kino, das Restaurant, das Stadion, das Schwimmbad, das Museum and so on.

3. Visualise: this is one of the most important tools to remember things. Visualising or actual viewing helps us remember words well. I discovered this trick, while I was a student and I use it every time I see a new set of vocabulary. 

Eg: I’m sitting on a chair, in front of a table

Der Tisch, der Stuhl 

Now I will visualise keeping things belonging to a study table and having the same article 

Der Stift, der Kuli, der Radiergummi, der Laptop, der Computer and so on. 

4. Learning fixed endings: if you manage doing this and bear the pain of learning the ending falling in a fixed case, articles for more than half of the nouns will be sorted. With time and through your observation you can also make your own rules. ‘-kunft ist die’, ‘-trag ist der’ and so on.

Eg: a noun ending with -Chen is always neutral (Das), -Ismus is always maskulin (Der) and -Schaft is always feminine (Die).

5. Do not forget: do not forget what you’re learning that’s obvious but also that every rule in German has exceptions. So rules like all alcoholic beverages are maskulin except beer, most fruits are feminine but ‘der Apfel’. 

These tricks have helped me a lot and I really don’t feel the pain of remembering the articles anymore. I hope it helps you too.