Practice
Exercises
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Here's a general exercise to practice noun genders.
Basic
Scientific Vocabulary This exercise lets you practice
the genders of the nouns in the Basic
Scientific Vocabulary for Scientific German 232. There
are over 80 items; you will see 30 of them each time you load
the exercise.
Masculine
| Male
people, male animals |
der
Mann, der Professor, der Lehrer, der Stier |
| Many
instruments/things that do things (when these words
end in -er or -or) |
der
Computer, der Toaster, der Kugelschreiber, der Motor |
Days,
months, seasons, most weather
elements |
der
Tag, der Freitag, der September, der Winter
der Schnee, der Regen, der Nebel [=fog] |
| Points
on the compass: |
der
Norden, der Süden, der Osten, der Westen |
| Makes
(names) of cars: |
der
Volkswagen/der VW, der Porsche, der Toyota
BUT NOTE: das Auto |
| Most
non-German rivers |
der
Mississippi, der Mekong, der Nil, der Amazonas |
| Most
nouns ending in -en |
der
Garten, der Hafen [=harbour], der Ofen [=oven] |
| Nouns
ending in... |
| -ig |
der
Honig [=honey], der Käfig [=cage] |
| -ling |
der
Schwächling [=weakling] |
| -ant |
der
Elefant, der Lieferant [=supplier], der Kontrast |
| -us |
der
Idealismus, der Kommunismus, der Zirkus |
Feminine
| Female
people, female animals |
die
Frau, die Professorin, die Kuh, die Gans |
| Most
German rivers |
die
Donau, die Mosel, die Elbe, die Weser, die Oder
BUT NOTE: der Rhein, der Main |
| Most
nouns ending in -e |
BUT
NOTE: der Käse, der Name, das Ende, das Auge, der
Affe [and other animals], der Biologe [and other male
job designations], der Kunde [=customer] |
| Nouns
ending in... |
| -ei |
die
Bücherei (library), die Datei (file [on a computer]) |
| -schaft |
die
Wissenschaft [=science], die Freundschaft [=friendship];
die Wirtschaft [=economy; also means "pub"!] |
| -heit/
-keit |
die
Dummheit [=stupidity], die Schwierigkeit [=difficulty] |
| -ung |
die
Landung [=landing], die Bedeutung [=meaning] |
| -tät |
die
Universität, die Elektrizität |
| -ion |
die
Situation, die Religion, die Funktion |
| -ik |
die
Logik, die Ethik, die Symbolik, die Mechanik |
| -ie |
die
Philosophie, die Biologie, die Monotonie, die Magie |
| -enz/
-anz |
die
Frequenz, die Toleranz, die Diskrepanz |
| -ur |
die
Kultur, die Prozedur, die Natur |
Neuter
| Human
babies and animal babies |
das
Baby, das Kind, das Kalb, das Lamm |
| Most
metals |
das
Gold, das Kupfer, das Silber, das Nickel, das Kadmium |
| Verb
infinitives turned into nouns |
das
Leben [=life], das Schwimmen (as in: Swimming is fun) |
| Collectives
with Ge- |
das
Gebäude [=building], das Gebirge [=mountain range],
das Geschrei [=screaming], das Gebüsch [=bushes] |
| Nouns
w. diminutive suffixes: -chen, -lein (and their dialect
forms: -le, -erl, -el, -li) |
das
Kindlein, das Mädchen, das Hartmutchen
Hänsel & Gretel |
| Nouns
ending in -ment or -(i)um |
das
Experiment, das Museum, das Datum, das Opium |
Fun Facts (Which gender is most common? Does gender affect the way we think?)
Click here for an article by Duden (in German) that includes the following fun facts:
- 98.7% of German nouns have a single gender. Just under 1.3% can be used with two genders, and .02% can be used with all three genders. Less than 0.1% of nouns have no gender at all (e.g. AIDS, Allerheiligen (a holiday)).
- Of the nouns with a unique gender, 46% are feminine, 34% masculine, and 20% neuter. So, if in doubt about the gender of a noun, guess "die" :)
Click here for a generally fascinating article on the results of actual empirical research on how language affects the way we think. Here are some things this article says about gender:
- Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a "key" — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal," "serrated," and "useful," whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny," and "tiny." To describe a "bridge," which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said "beautiful," "elegant," "fragile," "peaceful," "pretty," and "slender," and the Spanish speakers said "big," "dangerous," "long," "strong," "sturdy," and "towering." This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures). And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers. Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people's ideas of concrete objects in the world.
- In fact, you don't even need to go into the lab to see these effects of language; you can see them with your own eyes in an art gallery. Look at some famous examples of personification in art — the ways in which abstract entities such as death, sin, victory, or time are given human form. How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native language. So, for example, German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman.
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