Welcome back to the Better German podcast. This episode is a number two episode about German articles. it is the second part of the episode that I recorded last week. questions that people ask about this subject and I am going to answer them or I am going to to try to answer them. So, number one, how do I know whether a noun is der, die or das? Well, you don't usually know it just from looking at it. So if you're a beginner, you know it because it is hopefully on the list. Or if not, then you have to look it up in a dictionary. If it's der, das. There are a few patterns, but basically you also learn these by learning them and by recognizing the pattern when you see it. Is there a trick to learning German articles? I've told you no. Well, the yes and no. The trick is to not try to memorize them, to repeat them and to consider them part of the word and to repeat the word, including the article. Enough. By making sentences, by making exercises, by writing sentences, and then you will remember them. Do I really have to memorize the article for every noun? Again, yes and no. As I said, I wouldn't memorize them. But yes, eventually you will have to learn the article for every noun. But I've given you examples. It becomes easier because you will know more and more words that are similar, that have the same ending, or that are like a composite with another word. So it will become easier. But yes, at the end of the day, you have to learn them. Why does German even have grammatical gender? Well, I don't know. You have to ask the God of language. It's just the historic development that has that Germanic languages have a tendency. It's actually interesting. German kind of like in between. Not all Germanic languages really have them, as we've gone over. English doesn't have them. So it's a good question, but it's not something weird that only German is doing. How do German children learn the articles? That is a very, very, very good question. Now, there is no "Article Course", obviously. So children learn the nouns first and they learn the articles basically with them So maybe let's say you have a very, very small child and maybe "Ball" is one of the first words. And honestly, right there, they're not learning the article right there. They will say, " Ball" and then they will say, and people will throw them the ball or whatever. But in a year later or something like that, when kids start to use sentences, they might leave them out in the beginning. They will maybe say "spielen Ball," play ball. But very soon they come to the point. You know, you learn first words and then you learn small sentences and so on, and then they will start communicating in complete sentences and they will hear sentences and the mama will tell them something like that, where is the ball? And the child will hear "ein Stein." And maybe he or she will say, not say the article first. And parents will not usually correct them all the time. But parents are different. Maybe some do, maybe some don't. Maybe they will go like child will say "wo ist die Ball," could be. And then the mama will probably repeat and say, "wo ist der Ball?" "Where is the ball?" And the child will hear, ah, it's there. And eventually, you know, it will stick. So at the end of the day, yes, it is natural to be very honest. The word will probably stick easier and faster than the article. However, you're already an adult probably, or definitely older than baby, so you can probably handle more at the same time than a baby. But still it is natural and that you don't learn all the articles immediately. Good. So number six, Do German native speakers always know the correct article? Well, not always. I think I've started out with this. Not if they never heard the word and it's not obvious what it is. But yes, usually we know the correct articles. Are there rules for der, die and das or is it completely random? wouldn't say that there are rules, there are patterns, as I said. So "das Haus." Everything that has "Haus" at the end is "das." And everything that has "keit" at the end, "keit" or "heit" is "die." For example, "die Krankheit." That would be "ness" in English, the illness or sickness, it's "die," don't know why that came up—"die Sturheit." That's the stubbornness. So everything that has "keit" or "heit" at the end is "die." And you will see that. But honestly, I don't think that the correct way of going about it, particularly if you're a beginner, is to learn, oh, everything that is "keit" is "die." But you will learn two, three words that have "keit" or "heit" at the end. And then you'll see. Ah, okay, good. This is always "die." That's what it is. Can I become fluent if I keep getting articles wrong? Depends a little bit on what you consider fluent, but I would say yes, I don't think that you don't have to aim at becoming error free. You will not achieve that unless you keep going. And the goal is not to be error free. The goal is to be able to communicate. So while you always try to improve and learn these things correctly, at the same time, you cannot make yourself crazy about this. This is not everything. This is just an article. What I'm interested in is can you communicate and can you understand what people are saying, which is part of communication? And you will probably be able to communicate quite well before you come to the point of never making an article mistake. And frankly, when we speak fast, we make mistakes, we know them. But you know, when you speak fast in any language, you don't always use Perfect grammar number 10. What happens if I use the wrong article? Will Germans still understand me? Yes, usually. So if you say "die Baum" instead of "der Baum" and you say "die Baum ist schön," yes, of course we will understand you. The problem starts somewhere else. The problem is that this gender determines a lot of other things. For example, if you say the sentence, okay, "ich habe gekauft," I bought a table. So then basically you continue talking about the table and you say "er," because it's "der And that is just an example. So if you don't use those correctly and then you suddenly say in a sentence "sie" instead of "er," then people may not know what exactly you're talking about, or you may be confused what the person is talking about. So that is the bigger than getting it wrong. So in a sentence where you have the noun, Everybody will understand you. Why is "das Mädchen" neuter if it's a girl? Yeah, tricky one, I can tell you. It's just the weirdness. But actually there is, if you want to know, there is thing, an explanation that makes a little more sense. And it has to do with how the language has developed. So as you, as I mentioned, there is things that you can end to the end of a word with a meaning like "heit," "Krankheit." That's a noun from "ill," so "illness." And "-chen" is if you add something to the end of a word that makes—it's kind of like an endearing thing, or it makes it smaller. There is no one 100% translation or something like that. But for example, if you have the English word "book" and you add the syllable "-let," "booklet," then you have—it's basically a small book. Or if you could, basically you can do the same thing with "pig" and you can say "pig" a pig, yeah, and then "piglet" is a small pig, basically. So "-chen" is something similar, except that it is used much more than "-let." So "-chen" is something that you can add to a word that will make it small. So for example, "das Haus," the house, "das Häuschen," that's a small house. "der Tisch," the table, and you can add— and you say "das Tischchen." So that's a small table. can add that to a lot of words and "-chen" is built exactly like that. So when you add "-chen" to any word to make a new word, the gender is always "das." So anything with "-chen" at the end is "das." So, "das Häuschen," the little house, or "das Tischchen," the little table, "das Sesselchen," the little chair, "das Bettchen," the little bed. So you can add them to a lot of words. As I said, "Die Flasche," that's bottle. "Das Fläschchen," that's a little bottle. And "Mädchen" has come about exactly like that. It comes from a word "Magd," that is actually in itself not used a lot anymore. "Magd" was a word that meant young woman. It also meant servant or a person working in a—like as a helper on a farm. But it also meant the young woman. And a small young woman is a girl. And that's how "das Mädchen" came about. But I have to admit it's a little weird. It's a little—it's—we are very much used to it, so we don't think about it. But I understand that this is weird. Next one. That's a funny one. Why is "der Käse" masculine and "die Milch" feminine? It makes no sense. Honestly, I don't know what to tell you about it. That's just the way it is. What I can tell you is that genders are not usually logical. They have probably a historic way of going, like looking at it. So you're welcome—what you can do, but honestly, I would not suggest it to a beginner. But you can usually find answers if you dig deep in the etymology, in the historic development of the meaning of the word, and you go a few hundred years back, you can usually find an explanation there, like the one I just gave you about "Mädchen." But for "Käse" and "Milch," I don't have any obvious ones. Next one. Should I learn nouns without articles first and add them later? I would not suggest it, to be honest, because it will just add time. But if it happens that you remember the noun and not the article, don't fret about it. Just look it up and use it and practice it and eventually you'll remember it. What's the fastest way to memorize articles? Well, I've already told you, don't memorize them. That being said, there is actually one thing you can do and I'm just adding this to all of my courses few units. When we have another, I don't know, 50 new words that we've learned, we are making an exercise where we just write out the words with the articles and the plural, which you also have to learn, and we just repeat them a couple of times. And if when you repeat them, you notice, oh, didn't remember this word, then you use those a couple of more times sentences. But when I say repeat them, meaning I say them, and then the students repeat them like they say them after me. Or if it's on a video, then I'll make a video and I'll say, okay, good. So these are the words that we've learned in the last three units, for example, so write them up or look at them one more time. If there is any one of them that you don't remember, go ahead and make another few sentences with them so you do remember. And then I'll just say them. And I say, okay, I'll say it. You repeat it. "Das Haus," "das Haus," "das Fenster," "das Fenster," and so on. So that is something you can do, too. compound nouns have their own articles? No. And that is actually one of the patterns that I told you that can become very helpful. The bigger your vocabulary, the more easy it becomes or the easier it becomes. So a compound noun is a noun that has two more parts, either two words, or technically it could be a word and an ending called the suffix, something like this. And it's always the article of the second or the last part of the compound word. So if you have the word—okay, I'm just gonna say it—"Gas." "Gas" is a gas. Not petrol, but basically a gas that is also derived from the same source, oil. We have a lot of heating that are with gas, even though they're kind of being phased out now. So anyway, gas, "Heizung." So heating. The gas, heating. So the ending, as we said before, is always "die." So "die Gasheizung" is "die." You know that it is "das Gas" and "Heizen" to heat is a verb, and "Heizung" is "die," because—so that's also a compound noun. So any of these, whatever the article of the last part is the one for the whole word. I hope that that makes sense. Good. Then why does "der" become "den," "dem," or "des"? Now, that is a different subject that has something to do with cases. A case in German—I can hear some of you saying, what now? Okay, so German is a very interesting language, but also cases. We're not the only language that does that. All the Slavic languages has cases and many others. But English doesn't have cases. So again, what is a case? A case is a version of a word that is used to show what function the word has in a sentence. So I'm going to give you an article and not an article. I'm going to give you an example. So, for example, in English, you say, for example, the sentence "the man sees the tree," and we know because of the sequence of the sentence that the man is the one who's seeing and the tree is the thing that is being seen. In German, we would say "der Mann sieht den Baum." So both words are "der," "der Mann," "der Baum," but we change, in this case just the "den." And this is a case. So we change to "den Baum." And that means we know that "der Mann" is the one who's seeing and "den Baum" is the thing that is being seen. And you could say, well, I mean, we know that in English as well. But here's the thing. We have freedom, as in the word sequence. A big part of—not everything is completely free. But we can say "den Baum sieht der Mann." And that is still correct German. And the emphasis is more on "Baum." But anyway, we can say it, "den Baum sieht der Mann." And we know that still "der Mann" is the one who's seeing, and "den Baum" is the thing that is being seen. In English, if I say, say "the tree sees the man," then it's creepy and it's not possible, or it changes the meaning however you want to look at it. So we have changes that show us what—and there is more complicated and longer sentences. But I just wanted to give you a little bit of an example. So we have changes that show what is the function in the sentence, like who's doing what, basically. And these are the cases. These are called cases. This is how they came about. If you want to learn more about German cases, there are three episodes actually that I made about this. It's actually one episode, but I cut it in three because it was so long. That is episode 35 to 38. There's also a PDF that is this point, at the point of recording, you can get the PDF either at bettergerman.info/cases and you will have to sign up for it, but at this point in time it's free. Or you can sign up to the Better German community, to the Better German Podcast community. There is a free tier available and you will find all of the podcast resources in there sorted in one place. There is a section in the community called Resources, and the first big junk in there is the podcast resources. And you find for every podcast episode where we have resources, you will find them there. So you can do that. However, that is basically the basics of cases. So "den," "dem," or "des" are—so "der," "des," "dem," "den" are the four versions for the four cases that exist. I don't want to go into what they all mean. That's again, like, as I said, that is different episodes, but this is what it is. Yeah. The biggest changes are with "der," where we really have four different versions. For "die" and for "das," for some reason, we're recycling some that we already have. So I don't know why. think maybe at some point they also had versions and we just lost them. Okay, how many article rules are there really? So that is a question that I can't really answer, but I also think it is an irrelevant question because as I said, you don't have to learn a rule. You keep learning your words, you keep learning your vocabulary. And you will see the rules automatically if you keep repeating them and learning them properly. 18. How accurate are article guessing rules? The ones that I told you with the compound, with the "keit," and the—they're pretty accurate. If it's really a guessing rule, then, yeah, wouldn't say there is rules. Something like—many nouns that end with an "e" are female, so this one's pretty useless because maybe 70 or 80% of the nouns that end with an "e" are female. That means 20% of them aren't, and there is no way of figuring out how. And so I think it's not a very sensible Can Germans explain why a noun has a particular gender? Not better than what I said. So it's there. If you mean, is there a logical reason why "Fenster" is "das," but "Tee" is "die"? No, there isn't. We can't explain it. What are the most common article mistakes learners make? I mean, I think you want to know some. This question is probably supposed to mean, so this is the word that they all get wrong. I don't know any. But the biggest mistakes that people make about articles is to not just practice them enough with the word and then—and learn them and consider them as part of the word. Okay, So I said I was gonna bust some myths. So here are the myths. I've basically covered this already, but I'm summarizing them. So myth number one, there is a secret trick about articles. No, there isn't. Myth number 2: German speakers know complicated rules. Actually, no, there is a lot of complicated rules that we know without being able to necessarily all explain them. Like when there is changes and why, because this becomes that and so on. Yes, but not about the genders. There is not a lot of complicated rules that we know. We just kept hearing them and learned them that way. And you must—myth number three is you must memorize thousands of articles. Well, first of all, there's only three. As I said. No, you're not supposed to memorize any of them. You're just learning them with the noun. And you'll get better at it automatically, basically. Okay, so I think I've said anything and more that I have to say about articles. The real gist of it is, don't worry. Yes, you will make mistakes. That's natural. Do learn them the way I told you. Learn them with the new words, practice them with the new words, and you'll be fine. So I hope that this makes sense. If you have any more questions about this, do ask me. You can always reach me at Better German. Sorry. Susi@bettergerman.info, you can reach me also at bettergerman.info by just using the contact form. If you're interested in a course, we have courses. You can do my Get Talking course and continue from then there on up for 47 a month. It's a hybrid course. So you get videos, you have exercises, written, exercises. We will work on pairing you up with a partner. So we will help you to find a partner that you can practice with. And we get together every two weeks to answer questions, practice more, and things like that. So this one is available now currently for 47 a month. 47 euro a month. If it's not live for some reason, then absolutely just write to me and I'll send you a link. So this is what I wanted to tell you about articles. And I'll talk to you in the next episode. Bye bye.