Well, sometimes Germans themselves are not quite sure about which article to use. It differs from north to south, from east to west and depends a lot on the dialect you're used to.

An (Upper-)Bavarian would for example never say "die Butter". It is and will always be "der Butter". Same with "der Radio" in the South and "das Radio" for the rest of the country.

Another funny thing I stumble upon every time Oktoberfest starts: Oktoberfest in Munich is referred to as "die Wiesn" (the lawn/grassland). Bavarians don't know an 'e' in the end of a noun, they will therefore always replace it with a 'n'. In the rest of Germany, Wiesn doesn't exist. It's either 'Wiese'(sgl, a single grassland) or 'Wiesen' (pl, many grasslands). Since Wiesen sounds more similar to 'Wiesn' than 'Wiese', even newspapers regularly refer to the Oktoberfest as a multiple of 'Wiese' which - for us - sounds just wrong: "Heute sind wir auf den Wiesn gewesen".

It gets worse with new words. Sometimes, there's a "correct" way of deriving the article I guess, but it sounds weird.

For example Blog. Correct would be "das Blog" (because "das Web-Log" = "das Logbuch" or "das Protokoll"), but "der Blog" sounds nicer imho. Some people say "das Laptop" although this sounds off for most and "der Laptop" is correct.

For other words, the article can change over time. Correct is "das Virus", because it's a Latin word and the ending -us comes with "das". But most people say (and the media writes) "der Virus".

> Sometimes, there's a "correct" way of deriving the article I guess, but it sounds weird.

No. If something sounds right to a native speaker, it's correct.

It’s even more complicated, as even Bavarians use the articles by context, using the proper one when speaking standard German and the variation when using dialect. Alas, not everyone has the same level of dialect, especially in Munich, so you can hear both even when Bavarian is in use.

As for the plurals, the -e suffix can often both be left out and replaced with an n, so you have two singular forms for some words.

But again, without the dialect it won’t work. As the GP said, you’ll still be understood, though. As with most languages, a lot of parts are superfluous and can be determined by context.

I have asked multiple germans about gendered nouns and other funky grammar points. I often end up getting different answers or confusion when I relate what I learnt from a reliable source elsewhere. Honestly, despite the confusion, I love how diverse the German language is despite the relatively small range and number of speakers, but also considering it came under many of the same forces for "flattening" the rules as English did.

I have a weak spot with articles, i, a native speaker, have to think for long about "teller" is it "der Teller" or "das Teller". One is my local dialect the other standard German. I know which one to use by imagining how my old neighbor would talk.

Another gem is that in my local dialect the word for foot (Fuß) has an extended meaning and denotes the body part of foot and leg. There basically is not a separate word for leg (well there is but it's standard German not dialect). The standard German word for leg is "bein". Now Bein has a common ancestor with a similar word in English "bone", and indeed the dialectal version of Bein in my dialect is the word for bone. (To me that indicates that the word has made a meaning change in standard German).

Now if I don't think hard (or if I am tired) I will call my leg "foot" in English, which confuses everyone.

There is also the German word "Gebein" which is the literal translation for bone and probably the origin of the dialect "Bein" you use.

I think I looked it up in an etymological dictionary and the dialectal form is archaic, I.e standard German uses a "mutated" version of the word.

Probably in German both meanings were used alongside for a while and then folks started to attach a "ge-" in front of one meaning to avoid confusion.

From my experience you don't learn the grammar of your mother language the way you learn it when learning a language later. This appears to be universal. You just do what feels right and it works out but you can't cite the rule that applies.

Being a native speaker does not imply knowing the rules.

It really isn’t as diverse as you seem to think. As suggested in another comment, these German speakers you talked to simply didn’t know the correct forms: The German language is generally quite prescriptive, there’s little room for variation outside dialects (which are not “correct/standard German”).

(And then there are Platt (= Low German) and Alemannisch/Schwyzerdütsch, both of which are distinct languages from High German.)

> It really isn’t as diverse as you seem to think. As suggested in another comment, these German speakers you talked to simply didn’t know the correct forms: The German language is generally quite prescriptive, there’s little room for variation outside dialects (which are not “correct/standard German”).

Nonsense. If a native speaker uses a form and thinks it's correct, it by definition is.

I think this is misleading: Dialects exist but they don’t change the rules of standard German grammar. In German, only “die Butter” is correct, regardless of where you are. Upper Bavarians may use “der Butter” but there’s an understanding that this is dialect, and not correct German. It’s fine in daily usage but not in more formal speech or in writing.

(A better example is “Mus”, which has multiple correct genders.)

German is a lot more prescriptive than English. This is only different for neologisms and anglicisms (“Newsletter”), where a generally accepted gender hasn’t been established through usage yet (Duden now lists “Newsletter” as masculine, but both “die Newsletter” and “das Newsletter” were common until recently).

It depends on the word. Der oder das Radio for example: das Radio(gerät) oder der Radio(empfänger) defines the article. The same can be distinguished for butter: the word's origin might originate from Greek or Latin - depending on which language you choose, you'd get a different article.

That’s not true. Only “das Radio” is correct Standard German. Only “die Butter” is correct Standard German. Other forms may well be common, and accepted as dialect. But they’re not Standard German, which means they’re not taught in school (except by mistake), and are not acceptable in official communications. You may not like that German is so overly prescriptivist (I have issues with it) but it’s a simple fact.

Additionally, your explanation about the origin of the gender of “Butter” is entirely apocryphal: the original Greek/Latin gender has at best an indirect influence on the gender of the modern German word (and in fact both were neuter: βούτυρον vs butyrum).

Native German speaker: Most of the time we think it's just funny if you get the gender wrong, no harm done. As you said, there's very few instances where there are words changing meaning if you swap out the article. And even then, it's ususally obvious from context. (Der Schild => the shield; Das Schild => the sign). I do get the frustration though, I had to learn French in school and I'm currently learning Swedish (I'd consider their en and ett words something conceptually similar to the gender thing).

I also agree about mapping the prepositions, but I think that applies to learning other languages in general, or at elast, more than just the pairing German/English. I can only compare it to English => Swedish (I had not interest in learning French as a language, I was more trying to get a passing grade in it. And I do have to learn Swedish from the English perspective, because Duolongo doesn't offer a German => Swedish course), but it's the same thing

> I'd consider their en and ett words something conceptually similar to the gender thing

En and ett words actually are genders (or "genus"), they are known as utrum and neutrum respectively.

In case no one told you "en" words usually map to masculine and feminine in German, and "ett" words are neutral.

As a native Swedish speaker, albeit with little interest in languages and grammar, I can't see how that would help anyone. How do you know if "bil" (car) is masculine/feminine or neutral (en bil, ett bil)? Open to learn here :)

It helps because words describing a profession, a person or something animate are usually male/female. The same goes in Dutch, where "de" refers to male/female and "het" to neutrum.

There are several rules of thumbs which can help foreigners to correctly guess the article in both Swedish and Dutch. Of couse, they'll only be an accurate guess at best, but they can give you a headstart as a novice learner.

Well, it works for many cognates. Haus/house/hus all come from the same word, so if you know that it's "ein/das Haus" you can expect it to be "ett hus/huset" in Swedish. Same with e.g Hund/hound/hund, "ein/der Hund" is masculine so it is of common gender in Swedish "en hund/hunden".

Back when I Lived in Germany a colleague used to have fun when I said "meine Deutsche" instead of "mein Deutsch" when referring to my knowledge of the language.

After 2 years I just stopped worrying about articles, knowing that I would anyway always sound like auslander to them.

I even suspect that wrong gender is a running gag among Americans. See "Hotel das Alpen" on the show "Titans" and "Der Waffle Haus" on the show "Dead like me".

Since I'm doing the same thing but the other way around I'll trade you Swedish for German if you'd like.

While it's true that people that want to understand you would understand you, even if you speak wrong, it's not something "not to worry about".

Using the wrong gender or articles quickly gives a hint that you are some lowly educated factory worker living in Germany for 20 years and not caring to learn the language.

That's true but I'd say it's less about appearing lowly educated than about reinforcing your foreign-ness.

A lot of Germans are to varying degrees prejudiced against foreigners, especially if you're brown or can be read as Turkish/Arabic or Eastern European. If you pass as white European you're more likely to be read as educated but still learning the language whereas otherwise your language problems are more likely to be attributed to a general lack of intelligence and education.

I'm not saying all Germans think this but there are certain cultural clichés around uneducated "southerners" (generally Italy, Greece, Turkey but also Arabs and everything West of France) and Eastern Europeans speaking broken German the same way Americans have stereotypes about people speaking AAVE.

In other words broken German has a cultural stigma but depending on how you are read you may be less impacted by it. If your career is going to involve speaking German a lot, it's probably advantageous to speak it well.

It also shifts with time. 30 years back the prejudice would have been flipped. As a white immigrant you would've probably been a low educated russian or polish worker, while with a taint you would've been Italian and much more respected.

It's the general bad practice of putting individuals into larger groups with a stigma based on visual appearance.

I think a lot of the resentment about bad German skills in my generation (80s/90s) comes from 10+ year residents and 2nd generation immigrants not capable of speaking our language correctly.

I mean in the seventies and eighties there was a lot of racism against Spaniards and Italians. Nowadays this is gone. They are allowed to be proud of their heritage.

We also had a lot of highly educated migrants from Yugoslavia back in the seventies and they were appreciated back then. But after the Balkan wars they were suddenly the bad guys despite some of them being perfectly integrated in our society and sometimes being the third generation to live here.

It's funny how fast the perception shifts and how quickly we are to judge on the prejudices we have of a group of people and not on the individual.

Some comes from the attitude of creating the group "2nd generation immigrants". In the US, that's basically not a thing.

There are reasons of course, just sayin'.

I would say, in the US it is at the same time "not a thing" and "an even bigger thing". I guess it is easier to be seen as American, but on the other hand, those Americans claim they are Irish/German/Italian (and the corresponding percentages), because of some great-grandfather. Germany historically also has had immigrants (e.g. Ruhr area with it's mines) but those people don't think they are Polish/Romanian, because of their ancestors.

Yeah birthright citizenship for one. Complaining that people who don't belong to a group don't identify with it and act like it is just stupid.

Doing so while not allowing them is cruel and stupid like punching someone for having a black eye and justifying it with their face looking weird.

There is the option to obtain the citizenship following the procedure for it.

There is the option to leave the country.

It doesn't sound entirely unreasonable or unfair to me.

There is also the option of being a citizen by birth, yet be called 2nd generation immigrant, or heck, third.

Yes, there is racism and ethnic stigmatization in Germany. It even goes both ways. It's a sad mess.

It's also sometimes fun to play with this kind of prejudice: I'm from the UK, but if I'm having a bad language day, a bad hair day, or I'm wearing my work clothes, I get some people being very unfriendly, often rude, because I'm clearly Eastern European. As soon as it comes up that I'm from the UK, the reactions totally change.

> or Eastern European. If you pass as white European

Eastern Europeans are very much white. Their accent might give them away but certainly not the skin complexion.

East of France?

West of France. Spain, Portugal and possibly the Southern parts of France. But ethnic stereotypes are of course silly and somewhat arbitrary so I don't think it's possible to draw a clear line.

"Hedonistic lazy people with dark hair who steal our daughters" seems to be the general idea. This is somewhat distinct from "lazy people with light hair who steal our things", which seems to be the stereotype against Eastern Europeans.

Maybe they meant Spain and Portugal?

I agree. People will understand you, but they will also judge you. In my experience, Germans are much more ready to notice "wrong German" than English speakers do with "wrong English". This is just a sad fact.

My aunt, an American who has lived in German-speaking countries for 10+ years and can say almost everything she'd want to tells me she still gets treated less seriously because of subtle mistakes like that in her speech.

My experience is that after some time and level of proficiency in a language, some just stop learning and caring. I think that is a pity because I believe that with revisiting the rules in interesting exercises one can fix the mistakes even later.

It may help your Aunt to learn German (again) with beginners books. There are good self-learner books with interesting exercises. They are less than 20€ per level and if you are already good, it should be easy to do multiple pages per hour.

It would be important for a native speaker to check the answers, though. And also the solutions should be crosschecked with the books solutions, if there are any, because many Germans don't know all the rules correctly. If in doubt, just stick with the book.

Why do you think Americans judge less or do not judge?

I agree.

Probably it's good to know that it doesn't matter, just so that you feel less fearful and tend to speak more, even wrong....

> Probably it's good to know that it doesn't matter, just so that you feel less fearful and tend to speak more, even wrong....

Native German speaker here: I disagree with all the sentiment of "less fear". Better concentrate on your ability to formulate grammatically correct sentences.

In school, I often felt that the German grammar works somewhat like a mathematical proof system (and asked myself why German grammar is not part of math classes). When studying mathematics, you first have to learn to write correct proofs. It makes no sense to try learn something more deep in mathematics if you have difficulties writing elementary proofs.

For German, it is the same: first learn the internal structure (grammar) of the language (just like predicate logic in mathematics) and just like thinking how to express something that you want to prove in predicate logic, find out how to formulate something in German's grammatical structure.

Only after this elementary step, you can begin with more complicated things.

Funny thing though is that most native speakers (of any language) generally don't know the grammar explicitly. They know it implicitly insofar as they speak correctly, but they'll generally be hard pressed to explain why they say things the way they say them.

Yes, but I find that you fill in the blanks as you use and are exposed to German.

These are some of the exact same observations that I've had while learning to the 10% fluency level. German has just been a joy for learning root word associations. Learning just a few root words can yield so much (think "die dienst").

Also nice is seeing a completely new German word in writing and immediately knowing with nearly 100% confidence how it is pronounced.

Compare that to the unfortunate person learning English, which almost seems deliberately designed to trick you with seemingly arbitrary pronunciations.

> das Mitleid - "mit" means with, and "leid" would be related to the verb "leiden", to suffer. So you'd have "with-suffering", which makes it possible to guess the actual meaning - "compassion"

That is just the same in English. Although you probably need to remember a bit more etymology, and some Latin doesn't hurt, "compassion" is just the same. "com" means with and "passion" in this context also means suffering.

> some Latin doesn't hurt, "compassion" is just the same. "com" means with

English uses this "second register" to make words, which makes it harder. German and Dutch do not, they use the regular vocabulary. The classic example is scientific terms like "Carbon", ""hydrogen": In German "Kohlenstoff" and "Wasserstoff". It helps if you realise that "stoff" is stuff, material; "Kohle" is coal and "wasser" is water.

That's also the composition of 'sympathy', just that's Greek instead of Latin.

While you're right, I can't help but notice: It's important to know the difference between "composition" and "symposium" ;-)

And some ancient greek doesn't hurt either ( philosophy, philadelphia, telephone, etc ).

That neither latin nor ancient greek are part of the public education curriculum is a sin.

In some contries it is (as an option to choose from) and at some schools even compulsory.

>Unlike French, there are very few words where changing the gender has a different meaning

Being French myself I'm curious what makes you say that. I can't think of many nouns that change meaning if you swap their gender. They exist but I never thought that it was common enough to cause issues. For the most part I can understand strangers just fine even if get the genders wrong. "J'ai mis la téléphone dans le voiture qui est garé devant le maison" sounds obviously broken but absolutely unambiguous.

Also, French having only two genders means that you'll get it right at least half the time if you guess randomly, while in German you'd only have a 1/3 success rate, so there's that...

>I agree absolutely with not trying to map German propositions to English ones.

That's definitely true and it's not just with English <> German unfortunately, it's true with every language I've studied. Even among Romance languages there are significant differences (for instance "to dream of" is "rêver de" in French but "sonhar em/com" in Portuguese, and then there's the whole "por/para" distinction that doesn't really exist in French). Similarly I'm currently trying to learn Russian and that's one of many difficulties with the language (made even worse because you need to learn the right preposition but also what case it calls for).

What about if I say 'J'ai mis la téléphone dans la peau" instead of 'j'ai mis le téléphone dans le pot"?! I find in french that there is always another meaning behind a noun and it is easy to slip up.

I hadn't thought about homophones, that's a good point (and due to our quirky phonology there are many of those in French). That being said even in proper French we lose the distinction in the plural and I don't think that's really much of an issue, "le" and "la" both become "les": "les peaux" and "les pots" are pronounced exactly the same. I believe German does the same thing with plural "die".

Clearly if you told me the strictly correct sentence "les téléphones sont dans les pots" I would never wonder if you meant "the phones are in the pots" or "the phones are in the skins" because we don't generally put phones in people's skins (yet).

But that's using a whole different noun, albeit one that sounds similar. In this case using the correct gender won't help, especially if the sentence could make sense with both nouns.

They are homophones so they are different nouns but have the same sound. The only audible difference is the article gender. I think the original point was the (audible) gender doesn't change the meaning much in German vs French.

Not sure what you mean about "sonhar em/com". In this case em" is used to depict the medium, while "com" regards the subject. For example, "sonhar em alemão" means "to dream in German" (e.g. everyone talks in German), while "sonhar com alemão" means "to dream about German" (e.g. you dreamed you were in class).

In Portuguese you can also use "em" in sentences like "sonhou em regressar ao Brasil" (quoting an example from the Wiktionary). In French we would say "J'ai rêvé de retourner au Brésil", the literal translation with "en" would be nonsensical.

In my experience, not having German as my first language, you can get pretty far with guesses and rules of thumb as far as the genders are concerned. With experience your guesses will become more educated. You will start to feel the patterns in how the ending of a word maps to the gender of the noun, with some accuracy. You'll memorize some of the most common exceptions. "Impossible" delineations such as "mit das [..]" will feel wrong.

Also, by all means, memorize the delineation tables and the rotes that will help you identify accusative and dative. I still remember those from school and they never cease to be useful.

Oh, and by the way, it turns out that Polish is even worse in terms of grammar .. or maybe my mind is just less pliable these days :)

I like that I, as a german with "Abitur", still have no idea what Akkusativ, datic and whatnbot meeans.

Everything above 5th grade was reading poems and stuff, which I did great in :)

Well, Abitur from which state? Also helps if you had Latin.

In Germany the value of high school degrees depends hugely on the state in which you visited school.

You’re probably referring to the fact that the school system differs from state to state rather than being organised at the federal level but I find that quality of education differs a lot more between individual schools than it does between states, and not just because of the tiered system (grammar would be elementary school curriculum anyway).

As someone who went to four high school in three different German states, I can assure you, that the state is a very good indicator. As a child, you live in a world of stress when you move from easy to hard and basically repeat a year, when you move back.

In the simple example you give the genders don't matter and germans will quickly correct you but I'd still advise everyone to just learn the article with the noun and remember them as one unit. While German children don't learn this way it's more efficient for adult foreigners and helps a lot with more advanced grammar later on.

I haven't lived in Germany, but I've travelled there for work, and I've found that getting genders wrong confuses Germans. Or at least, German waiters.

Also pro-tip - when asking if a sauce is "hot", don't use "heiss" which literally means hot, the word you want is "scharf", spicy. Because "heiss" is slang for "horny" and if you phrase it wrong, you end up asking the Afghani waiter if the sauce is horny, and he looks a little aghast.

I agree with point 3 though, German makes a lot of sense when you learn how the words combine together.

I'm German and my first association if a German asked for heiße Soße, would be that they are asking about temperature, not spiciness and certainly not horniness. And as the other comment said, both heiß and scharf are slang for horny.

"scharf" can mean horny as well.

In this context they'd only think you are inquiring about the temperature of the sauce.

Could you share how you've learned to speak German during those 3 years? I have used all the common apps to learn German and reached an A2 level but going to B1/B2 is harder to achieve using only apps. Thanks!

I paid for courses at the start, which really helped.

Beyond that, reading books in German, and dealing with German society in German (surprisingly hard to do here in Berlin, as all the locals love to speak English, Jens Spahn excepted). Watch German TV.

I’m also lucky to have a few German friends who tolerate speaking to me in German, despite the fact their English is near fluent.

I can suggest you to go to a course if you want to reach B1/2 levels.

As a native speaker I can confirm that using the wrong gender is totally fine. Sometimes even native speakers don't know better. That is what I keep telling people.

I think the most important thing to watch out is the formal (Sie) and informal (Du) form of addressing people. Not so much of politeness, but it sounds very awkward if you would address kids with "Sie" for example.

Is there a German word for the delight one experiences when a person uses the wrong word unknowingly (as I often do) and creates a new and wonderful concept? As in "map German propositions to English ones." I do not mean to be snarky, I mispell thinks constantly.