Go to hell with der, die & das

“German is similar to English. I can learn it pretty fast!”, claimed many German learners at the beginning. Is this true or a big lie? “Hello” in German is “Hallo”, for “house” you say “Haus”, “sister and brother” is “Schwester und Bruder” and “trinken” is the German verb in the infinitive form for “to drink”. Looks quite simple and similar at first glance, but German language turns into total madness once you learn the three (!) articles for nouns, and when you add the different cases such as accusative, dative and genitive, it’s just pure torture. This is where the so-called naive learners of German take the sentence back from the beginning. Let’s take a closer look at these supposedly senseless articles.

Germany has, in contrast to the one and only English article “the”, three articles, named as “der”, “die” and “das”, which mark the gender of each noun. “Der” is masculine, “die” is feminine and “das” is neutral. If someone knows some very basic German or just started to learn, it would be obvious to them that it is “der Mann” for “the man”, “die Frau” for “the woman”, but “das Mädchen” for “the girl”? A girl is female but has the neutral article “das”. Does it make sense? Obviously not! Then, there is “der Tisch” for “the table”. How does one label a certain furniture with a certain gender? Sun and moon are often associated with certain male or female energies in a spiritual/yogic/vedic context. Sun represents male and moon female. In German though, it is “die Sonne”, which is the female noun for sun, and on the contrary it is “der Mond”, the male noun for moon. Valid questions arise if there are any rules to follow for gender identification of nouns or whether it is utter nonsense overall.

If one observes other languages, gender specifications in various forms also do exist. French (m: “le”; f: “la”), Italian (m: “il”; f: “la”) and Spanish (m: “el”; f: “la”) each have two articles for female and male nouns. In many South Asian languages the ending of the nouns reveals the gender, mostly male and female only, and often the verb ending also changes accordingly. But the Germans take it to another dimension by adding a third gender – the neutrum – which doesn’t make it less complicated. Native German speakers don’t (most of the time but not always!) make mistakes with the articles. Is it an inborn thing? And are German learners expected to learn the gender of all nouns rigidly by heart? Unfortunately, using the wrong gender for some nouns can make one look like a fool as it can change the whole interpretation of the sentence. For instance: “Bitte stellen Sie die Leiter an die Wand!”, means in English “Please lean the ladder against the wall!” The German noun for ladder is “die Leiter” and is feminine. If, by mistake, the masculine article for ladder is used (der Leiter), it is not ladder anymore but boss. You certainly don’t want to instruct your colleagues to place your boss against a wall.

Germans love law and order, but when it comes to grammar, it may go against law and order or without law and order at all. Many times, however, suffixes become gender indicators. Nouns ending with -er and -ant for example indicate masculine gender and -e, —heit, -keit and -tät indicate feminine gender. The suffixes -chen and -um stand for neutral nouns. Nevertheless these rules also come with exceptions, like “Butter” (eng.: butter) does not fit into this rule. Instead of “der Butter” it is “die Butter”. The following table can be taken for reference but it has to be noted that there exist exceptions.

Once German learners remember the noun suffixes, the next obstacle immediately arrives. As seen in the table above the ending -loge indicates a male noun. “Der Psychologe” is a counsellor, therapist or psychologist. If one wants to say “I am meeting the therapist now”, one would assume it would be in German “Ich treffe jetzt der Psychologe” but it is wrong. Correct sentence would be “Ich treffe jetzt den Psychologen.” What the hell? Why has “der” become “den” and why is there a suffix of -en in Psychologe? Now a game of the cases nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and singular/plural starts. Articles can change in these different scenarios and so do the noun endings too. See the table below of this game and here it is sure that Germans follow law and order without exceptions.

After studying, memorising, trying to understand and to draw logic from those, a visit to the Psychologist might be the last resort. In German: “Ein Besuch bei dem Psychologen könnte die letzte Rettung sein.” Be parrot-fashioned or go by your intuition – it’s your call!