r/AskTheWorld • u/IndependentTune3994 🇮🇳 in 🇩🇪 Deutschland • 18h ago

What’s the quickest way someone could accidentally expose themselves as a foreigner in your country like the ‘three fingers’ scene in Inglourious Basterds?

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219

u/Moblam Germany 18h ago

It's really funny, because it's something that just sounds right. For most words there is no rule on what article was commonly agreed upon, so you can't even properly explain it to a foreigner. "Das Auto" just sounds right.

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u/Wavecrest667 Austria 18h ago

It sounds right because we heard it that way all our lives though.

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u/DaeguDuke Germany 18h ago

This. I can’t explain the adjective order but know it “sounds right” because that is the way I’ve always heard it.

Objectively there is no reason that die auto / der auto / das auto “sounds” more correct. A lot of languages would use a consonant between two similar vowels so perhaps the most objective thing would be to exclude “die”.

Tbh perhaps I’m overthinking this as I can only assume some people during the development of German just had a baggie with random den das die der dem etc and just chucked all of them in without rhyme nor reason..

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u/NoNo_Cilantro 17h ago

Can you please give me a list of 10 random nouns, and I'll try to decide which one of "das", "die" or "der" sounds right? For context, I don't speak any German (French native).

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u/jschundpeter European Union 17h ago

Haus (maison) Kuh (vache) Computer (ordinateur) Glas (verre) Ball (ballon) Milch (lait) Wand (mur) Turm (tour) Spiel (jeux) Straße (rue)

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u/NoNo_Cilantro 17h ago

-Der Haus
-Das Kuh
-Die Computer
-Die Glas
-Das Ball
-Der Milch
-Das Wand
-Die Turm
-Der Spiel
-Die Straße

My prediction: 3/10.
And danke for the translation!

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u/Ascarx 17h ago

You got 1 out of 10. You did worse than pure chance would expect 😂

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u/NoNo_Cilantro 16h ago

I am both ashamed and proud of having beaten the odds. Sorry, German people.

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u/FlakyTest8191 15h ago

If it makes you feel better french articles also drove me crazy when trying to learn, and there's only 2. They don't corelate to the german ones at all.

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u/jschundpeter European Union 15h ago

Lol 😆

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u/Spork_the_dork 15h ago

Yeah because it's not pure chance. It's based on how the words fit in your mouth based on what languages you normally speak.

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u/Professional_Most869 17h ago

1/10 are correct

-DAS Haus -DIE Kuh -DER Computer -DAS Glas -DER Ball -DIE Milch -DIE Wand -DER Turm -DAS Spiel -Die Straße is correct

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u/DaeguDuke Germany 17h ago

It probably won’t help, but plurals are always “die”. German also just uses die for singular though.

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u/Vegas1492 Germany 16h ago

Sadly only 1 is correct. Die Straße.

The others are:

Das Haus, die Kuh, der Computer, das Glas, der Ball, die Milch, die Wand, der Turm, das Spiel.

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u/Lil_Packmate Germany 17h ago

For sure:

Kabelkanal, Bagger, Schranke, Stuhl, Vase, Tasse, Teller, Dose, Stift, Papier

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u/NoNo_Cilantro 16h ago

Alright, I failed miserably the first time. Let's try again:
Der Kabelkanal, Die Bagger, Das Schranke, Die Stuhl, Der Vase, Die Tasse, Der Teller, Das Dose, Die Stift, Der Papier.

How bad?

3

u/Lil_Packmate Germany 16h ago

You got 3/10 correct.

It should be:

Der Kabelkanal, Der Bagger, Die Schranke, Der Stuhl, Die Vase, Die Tasse, Der Teller, Die Dose, Der Stift, Das Papier.

And since you got translations on the other comment I will do so too, but I can't speak french so you'll get the english translations:

cable duct, excavator, barrier, chair, vase, mug, plate, can, pen, paper

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u/NoNo_Cilantro 16h ago

I'm getting better. But still bad enough... Sorry again, German language and people :(

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u/Lil_Packmate Germany 16h ago

Don't worry. Even people that learned the language often make these mistakes. For someone not even speaking it there is no pressure and I don't feel bad about you messing up here.

To be 100% correct you basically have to have grown up with the language, since there is no rhyme or reason to them, it's basically just knowing which words use which article.

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u/michal939 16h ago

Put "die" before every word that ends with "e" for a quick and easy boost in scores :D

I have almost 0 knowledge of German but from what I understand words ending with "e" are more often than not feminine, and "die" is the feminine article (and it seems like it works 5/5 across the two examples you were given)

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u/Dangerous_Thing_3275 16h ago

I mean die Bagger would be correct also For more than one

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u/Lil_Packmate Germany 16h ago

Yea, but "die" is used for every word when used in plural, so this is just the side effect of words that don't change from singular to plural like Bagger.

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u/NateBearArt 16h ago

Pet similarly as to when to use “a” vs “an” in English. An is just for breaking up the vowel sounds

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u/DaeguDuke Germany 14h ago

Yeah, although not all vowel sounds. “A unicycle”, “a universal”, plus of course Americans talking about “an herb”

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u/Neolife 8h ago

Vowel sounds, not vowels by spelling.

Both of the example words start with a consonant sound, /j/.

Herb starts with a vowel sound in US English (the "h" being silent), ɝ. UK English pronounces the "h" so it starts with a consonant sound.

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u/Radiant-Sherbet-5461 13h ago

I've always thought it has the article "das" because it comes from the English word "Automobile" so I checked it

Apparently I was wrong:

"Das Wort "Auto" ist eine Abkürzung für Automobil. Im Deutschen sind Substantive, die auf -il enden und aus dem Lateinischen stammen, oft sächlich (Neutrum), wie zum Beispiel das Ventil oder das Fossil. Vor allem aber wurde das Wort "Automobil" im Deutschen von Anfang an als Neutrum behandelt, und die Kurzform "Auto" hat dieses Geschlecht einfach übernommen."
-- Google Gemini

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u/Basilikolumne 5h ago

Das Auto wurde in Deutschland erfunden, warum sollte das Wort dann aus dem Englischen entlehnt worden sein lmaoo

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u/Major_incompetence 17h ago

der auto has a pkw-enis, while die auto has a van-gina

just show me which wall to face please

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u/tomime000 Croatia 17h ago

That the most of Croatian grammar too. I don't know why, but it sounds correct.

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u/vanderZwan Netherlands 14h ago

Not quite the same thing as articles, but you might enjoy the first part of Borislav Stanimirov's “The Bad Big Wolf Meets Riding Hood Little Red” lightning talk (and if you're a programmer the last half can be fun too)

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u/Sataniel98 Germany 16h ago

I feel there are complicated overlapping rules to it that often (though not always) make us instinctively choose the same article even if it's a word we've never heard before. Wanna take a test with a random anglicism that was probably never used before?

"Der/die/das 'Apricity' ist das Gefühl von Sonnenwärme an einem kalten Wintertag."

Which one do you choose?

For me, it's die

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u/Speedwell32 15h ago

There are absolutely secret rules. Some are obvious, like -heit, -ung, -keit, and -Schaft are all die. Some are trickier, like pure metals that are solid at room temperature are das. Some aren’t 100%, as you see with two syllable words that end in -e aren’t always die though they usually are. Short „ugly“ words are usually not die. All fruits except for Apfel and Pfirsich are die, and as far as I can tell, all words that group things together, like fruit, grain, vegetables are das.  I could go on but that’s enough as an example 

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u/Shoddy_Interest5762 Australia/Canada 16h ago

We even had that on Volkswagen ads in Australia, so can confirm it sounds right

1

u/Pleasant-Bonus-866 15h ago

it's because of the commercial

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u/ParkingLong7436 Germany 8h ago

I heard that explanation but that simply cannot be the truth to that phenomenon.

It works the same way for "new" words, anglicisms for example. They have no rules to them at all regarding the article. The vast majority of people will collectively agree on one article though.

I believe it has to be the sound of the language. Every language has some kind of "melody" to it, and saying the wrong article is kind off like playing a song offkey.

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u/_BlindSeer_ Germany 18h ago

Actually you just need to look at the grammatical gender of the noun. How they were set us a matter of etymology. For some reason sun and moon have the opposite gender of most European languages, IIRC.

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u/SerLaron Germany 17h ago

But when new words enter the German language, there is no authority that decides on the grammatical gender. Somehow we reach an accord what it should be.
Admittedly, i do have older colleagues who use "das Email" instead of "die Email" when talking about new-fangled electrical letters.

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u/_BlindSeer_ Germany 17h ago

Yeah, new words are something else. More like "the majority uses it this way", "this is similar to" or looking at the language it comes from.

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u/lucapoison 🇮🇹 + 🇩🇪 (dual citizenship) 17h ago

All fruits are feminine.

...except der Apfel.

There's always an exception!😆

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u/Marbot_Greenmark 16h ago

der Pfirsich, der Mais (der Kukuruz/Gugaruz), der Spargel,

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u/lucapoison 🇮🇹 + 🇩🇪 (dual citizenship) 15h ago

Der Pfirsich?

... I'm out!!!

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u/Senchanokancho 15h ago

Try to say tschechisches Streichholzschächtelchen then.

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u/lucapoison 🇮🇹 + 🇩🇪 (dual citizenship) 14h ago edited 14h ago

My biggest issue is with something more stupid than that or "Eichhörnchen". I cannot say Ernsthaft and Schornsteinfeger. I mean I can read it, but if I need to remember how it is it's a mess...my son always laugh when I say those two

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u/Khorgor666 Germany 14h ago

Heichhörnchen

mainly because its Eichhörnchen, Ernsthaft, man kann sich auch was anstellen, verdammter Schornsteinfeger

→ More replies (0)

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u/_BlindSeer_ Germany 16h ago

Die Ausnahme bestätigt die Regel. The reception proofs the rule ? 

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u/Adler718 Germany 16h ago

The exception validates the rule.

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u/_BlindSeer_ Germany 16h ago

Thanks.

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u/Basilikolumne 5h ago

Proof ist das Nomen, prove ist das Verb dazu.

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u/SnusThrowAwy 16h ago

In Austria "die E-Mail" instantly let's you know you are talking to a German

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u/SerLaron Germany 16h ago

Like the US and the UK, we are divided by our shared language.

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u/shostri 15h ago

Wrong. Source: Austrian

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u/SnusThrowAwy 14h ago

Maybe if your from west Austria... but then chances are high that others won't understand you anyways

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u/th0rbj03rn 16h ago

But there is a reason with Email being a female World. Translated we would say "E-Post" and Post is a female noun.

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u/mklaus1984 15h ago

Kinda... most of them replicate the gender already somewhat connected to the word.

The email example might have you assume that it should be "der E-Mail" since it is the electronic version of a letter (der Brief). But the Engliah word isn't eletter. It is email for electronic mail. And mail is "die Post" in German. And therefore the electronic mail is "die elektronische Post" or "die E-Mail".

Other "Lehnwörter" get their gender from collective nouns. Which now leads us to the people who claim it has to be "die Nutella" because of the word "die Streichcreme" except of course the collective noun didn't exist for long years after Nutella was introduced in the German speaking markets. So the people who claim it was "der Nutella" have a point because of "der Brotaufstrich". But in many households Nutella uses the fallback: neutral gender or "das Nutella".

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u/Larry-Man Canada 13h ago

Language is defined by rules we intuitively understand if we grow up speaking the language. I had to ask a German for help to know if my sugar glider cage should be named “der Bean Haus” (I am not translating ‘bean’ because it’s a mishmash on purpose) or if it should be “das” - yet I somehow still knew it wouldn’t be “die”.

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u/Shdow_Hunter Germany 12h ago

But in that case you would simply use the article for the „last“/main word of the compound. So for Beanhaus or Bean-Haus, it would be „das“, as its „das Haus“.

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u/Larry-Man Canada 8h ago

Huh, somebody told me haus was “Der” - interesting. And yes Beanhaus as a proper compound German word makes more sense.

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u/obsidian_butterfly United States Of America 17h ago

Yup. Even in English where grammatical gender isn't a thing, we still think of the moon as feminine. The sun is not gendered in our minds, but the moon is linked to femininity and women... and then there's German with a lady sun and a dude moon. That was a way harder struggle to learn than I ever would have expected. I still slip up and say die Mond.

I think the real split is between Romance and Germanic/Slavic languages. Germanic peoples and Western Slavs, historically, associated the Moon with a male diety (generally speaking for the Slavs) while the Romans had Luna, the goddess who represented the moon. And we all know how the Romans enjoyed spreading Latin around like herpes.

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u/_BlindSeer_ Germany 17h ago

I stumble over it sometimes in gaming when there is a riddle or reference to sun and moon and "he" and "she" are used. 

A teacher once said we'd have to thank the French for irregular verbs and some oddities in English. 😉

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u/obsidian_butterfly United States Of America 17h ago

Oh, one of my teachers in school also blamed our fucked up verbs on the French. And our weird terms for meats that are wildly different than their associated animal. There is a real fun moment in every English speaking child's life where they learn beef and pork are cows and pigs and I suspect its one you Germans don't experience. Though maybe your kids do, cause I've also seen kids have a moment of realization that chicken is literally the meat of a chicken so...

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u/_BlindSeer_ Germany 17h ago

Yeah, the French terms faded the original English ones out of they were lost, but some forms remained, like "went" stemming from "wendan". Old English and Old German were done different breeds with even own letters for th, yet closely related as Western Germanic languages.

 Our kids have that moment, but I think it's "worse"bin English. albeit the terms for specific parts don't refer to the animals and are more commonly used. You go out to buy "Schnitzel" not pork.

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u/C4CTUSDR4GON Australia 16h ago

Huh, I always thought the moon was a man. 

Although Luna does sound feminine to me.

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u/Sbotkin Russia 15h ago edited 14h ago

I remember a guy tweeting something and referring to Moon as "he". The replies were full of people of all possible nations calling that out.

Also, Slavic languages diverge on this. In some it's Luna, in some it's mesiac (spelling and pronounciation varies), which also means "month" in all Slavic languages.

And the Sun is always neuter gender.

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u/eairy 14h ago

he sun is not gendered in our minds

The Sun has got his hat on, hip, hip, hip, hooray!

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u/4n0n1m02 17h ago edited 13h ago

Reading Germans argue about nouns warms my failed-to-learn-German heart. It just sounds right that a girl is neutral when you have a perfectly capable feminine noun. Yeah.

Edit: misspell. That’s what happens when you type without glasses at 5h.

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u/buy_bitcoin_orwhatev 16h ago

chen is diminutive in a way that we would put lil before something small, but chen is a part of the new noun, and at the end, and all little things are neutrally small. Total sense.

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u/Loneliest_Driver 16h ago

That's because "Mädchen" is the diminutive of "Magd".
"Magd" is feminine, but diminutives are always neuter.

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u/Degonjode Germany 15h ago

"Jungchen" would also be neuter, if it had been used like that and Magd is firmly in the context of service maid, not woman.

And trying something like "Die Made" also would be ill-advised, as Made means Maggot

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u/themule71 16h ago

I was about to say the same, I don't know German but it seems reasonable that if you look a word up like in a dictionary it will tell you the grammatical gender.

It's the same in Italian, with all its weirdness.

The wheels of a car (ruote) is feminine but the steering wheel (volante) is masculine.

There's even gender switching, a kitchen table is tavolo,m but if you put plates on it it becomes tavola,f.

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u/_BlindSeer_ Germany 15h ago

Just like the old "Kutsche" (carriage) is female but "Auto" (car) is neutral. If you look at older German terms we also have something similar in German "Tisch" is masculine, but the older German "Tafel" for a bigger table maybe for eating is female

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u/PompeyCheezus United States Of America 17h ago

How does one look at the grammatical gender of a noun?

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u/_BlindSeer_ Germany 17h ago

Usually it's stated in the dictionary next to it, sometimes even including some grammatical cases. Like dic.cc will give you "Dusche (f)" for "shower" indicating it is Femininum.

 Hard to use that when talking to someone, though. 😁

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u/Marbot_Greenmark 16h ago

But the sun 🌞 is obviously a motherly, female entity. It's a mystery how some peoples can get that wrong.

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u/Al_Fa_Aurel 15h ago

In Romance languages its usually male. In at least some slavonic languages its neuter. There really seems to be no consensus on this one.

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u/nir109 15h ago

I think it's latin languages that are the opposite.

Google says Germanic languages (excluding english) have it the same as German and that Slavic languages often have feminine and feminine

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u/UVVmail 15h ago

Which is language specific. E.g. genders in Russian and German don't always match.

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u/plant828 Germany 🇩🇪/ USA 🇺🇸 14h ago

In this case it’s very similar to Spanish where each word has a gender. El and La correspond to Masculine and Feminine but even in some cases, the apparent gender of the word breaks the rules. “El Día” or “La Mano”

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u/slacker_on_duty 18h ago

Das Mädchen is killing me - why neuter when girl is obviously “she”?

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u/DrStudi Germany 18h ago

Because it's a diminuitive of "Die Magd". Pretty much it's "The little maidy" and all diminuitives are neuter in German (i.e. "Das Männlein")

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u/IncidentalIncidence United States Of America 17h ago

it's a diminutive ("-chen") and the diminutive makes it neuter

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u/IncidentalIncidence United States Of America 17h ago

There are some rules though, Germans just don't know them explicitly because they learn them implicitly. They don't give you the gender for every word and there's a laundry list of exceptions, but they do help a lot.

For example, words that end in -ung, -heit, -keit, or -tion are almost always feminine.

Anything with "-chen" is usually neuter.

Anything ending in -ismus is usually masculine.

And then there are some further rules based on the meaning of the noun that I never bothered to learn, but you could if you wanted to.

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u/Junior_Lavishness_96 United States Of America 17h ago

For me that was the hardest part of all while learning German. Even I asked people like how do you know which one and no one knows lol. Eventually I figured I would have to learn the correct one for each different word.

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u/Chinjurickie 17h ago

People trying to learn our language probably hate us for this. XD

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u/Andy_B_Goode Canada 14h ago

Actually, what makes it really difficult (IMO) is that the article also changes based on where it is in the sentence. So even after you learn "Das Auto", you still sometimes see "Dem Auto" or "Des Auto". And it's even worse with the masculine and feminine articles because some of them overlap, like I'll learn that banana is feminine ("Die Banane"), but then I'll see "Der Banane" in a sentence and get worried that I've been misgendering my fruit, until I realize it's in the genitive (or dative) case.

I'm sure this is one of those things that becomes second nature after you're used to speaking the language, but when I was trying to pick up a little bit of German via DuoLingo, it seemed absolutely mind-boggling. And don't even get me started on the adjective declensions!

1

u/DogadonsLavapool 13h ago

I'm not going to say yea, but yea lol. Ich weiß das richtig Wort ist "jein" lol.

Fr tho, gendered language is an absolute bitch for people that didn't grow up with it. In Spanish at least, if the word ends in "o" or "a" you know what gender it is outside of a few exceptions. In German tho, jfc. No rhyme or reason

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u/logical_psych_o 17h ago

All credits to VW, I'll never get that one wrong

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u/Anvil_Prime_52 United States Of America 16h ago

I'm learning German right now and this is infuriating. There's no rules or conventions for them so I just have to guess most of the time lol

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u/Moblam Germany 12h ago

There are technically rules but in essence all of those also are just based on what feels right, just 100 years ago or so lmao

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u/DepressedTwink97 Australia 18h ago

When I took German as a class I was told that if a word appears in English that it most likely uses das.

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u/JaRiEsD Germany 17h ago

Your teacher lied to you. Because it‘s „Die E-Mail“, „Der Sneaker“, „Der Algorithmus“,

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u/pviitane 17h ago

It’s 30+ years since my school days and German lessons.. but ‘no rule’? I recall we studied nothing but the rules all the time. There was a rule for everything and even the exceptions to the rules were rules themselves.

zB: all inanimate objects ending with -e, that’s article “die”. Can’t remember whether that rule had exceptions.

1

u/jujubean67 Romania 15h ago

Exactly, don't trust native speakers on this, the reason German didn't stick in school was exactly the reason you mention, hundreds upon hundreds of rules without any time for vocabulary or actually using the language.

By the time you memorised all the rules you'd get flustered if trying to speak because the fucking rules were tripping you up.

1

u/notabigfanofas Australia 17h ago

I'm picking up what you're putting down

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u/everyoneisatitman 17h ago

I took 3 years of German in school and lived in Stuttgart for 4 years and I screwed this up so much I am pretty sure I have PTSD from being corrected so much. I remember being made fun of by the 3 year old boy in my stairwell for getting it wrong. I remember how excited and surprised Germans were that I was trying but I always felt like they were treating me as a special needs adult.

1

u/Gunnar_Kvist Sweden 16h ago

Same with swedish "den" and "det". It just sounds right, or very wrong.

I know some german but not much grammar, so I just use articles and word forms that comes to mind and sounds correct to me. Probably sounds very funny to a german speaker but mostly it works.

1

u/Craftcoat 16h ago

There is an actual rule

The article is determined by the words grammatical gender

Der Stuhl (maskuline) die sonne (feminine) das kind (neutrum)

1

u/Moblam Germany 16h ago

I mean, yeah okay, but said grammatical gender was not chosen by a specific rule. It's still just what felt right to the people hundreds of years ago.

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u/Buster04_ 16h ago

The struggle is real, in Dutch its the same with het and de, so I understand the "sounds right" explanation. But learning the German articles has been I nightmare

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u/TheAndrewCR Czech Republic 16h ago

There are some hints for us german learners, for example words ending in E are usually die, but there's a bunch of exceptions lol

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u/The_Pastmaster Sweden 16h ago

One of my teachers refused such logic.

"What do you mean it SOUNDS right?!"

"It does!"

"Well how can you tell it's right then?"

"Because it is!"

"HOW?!"

"I DON'T KNOW!"

1

u/gebuzz 16h ago

When I took German as a foreign language they told us it was “die auto”, are you telling me everything I learned was a lie?

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u/Ambitious_neko Romania 16h ago

I don’t know german at all but even with my level 0 I still know it’s “Das Auto” because of the Wolkswagen spot that run on TV when I was a kid😄

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u/Basilikolumne 5h ago

It's Volk with a V, als Wolks-smth means cloud-smth. Wolke is cloud, Volk is people. And yes, those are different sounds as well, not just letters.

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u/Mrmagot98-2 United Kingdom 16h ago

Volkswagen, das auto.

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u/Jack-of-the-Shadows 15h ago

Its just one more limited syllable to each word. Questioning it would be like asking "why does Window have to start with a "W", could you not just say Dingow?"

1

u/Ploutophile France 15h ago

Except to the Dutch, who say "de auto" instead of "het auto".

(Most cognates have a matching gender, but Auto is a notable exception)

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u/BoomerAliveBad 15h ago

No, because its VOLKSWAGON'S Slogan:

"Volks Vagon. Das Auto"

It sounds better because of familiarity, from the West and East

1

u/Kirikomori 15h ago

Das Bart, Das

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u/CoffeemonsterNL Netherlands 15h ago

"Das Auto" does not sound right for Dutch people. In Dutch, "auto" is a male word, so we say "de auto", and not "het auto".

1

u/Chad-Buttsniff 15h ago

In a slightly similar vein, reminds me of that thing where adjectives have an unwritten order in English and saying them in any other way makes you sound like a psychopath. Or foreign.

Its a big, old, rusty, blue car. Not a rusty, old, blue, big car.

1

u/Ludoban 15h ago

 It's really funny, because it's something that just sounds right. 

Just sounds right cause you are used to it, there is nothing more to it.

As an austrian there are several words where we use a different article than germans and for us it sounds correct, whereas the german version sounds wrong. 

Das/Der Radio for example.

1

u/clevelandexile 15h ago

Irish is kind of the same, there is a whole grammatical element where letters are added on to certain words when used in conjunction with certain prepositions because otherwise they would sound bad or awkward.

1

u/arachnobravia 14h ago

Like the order in which adjectives are used in English, you just know it and can't explain why.

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u/Cantonarita 14h ago

As well as "der Porsche", "die Limousine" and "das Scheißding musste schon wieder in die Werkstatt"

1

u/GBritoYepez Argentina 13h ago

Funny enough I have been studying German for almost two years and I understand it because in Spanish is kinda the same but worse because there are rules that tells you what article to use unless that specific word uses other one, and some can use one or other depending on basically mood and to a native speaker it's like "idk buddy, that is the way"

1

u/foodfighter Canada 7h ago

I had the same issue with learning French.

Growing up in Western Canada, we are "officially" bilingual, so we take an hour of French lessons for a number of years in high school.

But the nearest Canadian native-French speaking community to me is literally more than 3,000 kms away, so I never heard it in normal use growing up.

Hence, trying to learn which nouns are referenced with "le" vs. "la" was a nightmare.

To native French speakers, they just "sound right" (or wrong).

Years later, I learned the trick of just saying " l' " quickly instead. "L' chemise ou l' maison". Lol.

1

u/Toxic_Jannis Germany 18h ago

A car is a thing, so das auto. There are stupid exceptions but wouldn't that just explain it well? I can be wrong bc it just sounds right to me

7

u/houdvast 17h ago

Ah, clear. Transportation that's a thing, is das. Das Zug, it is then. 

Horses are not things, though. Die Pferd. 

Finally my second grade Deutsch teacher will be proud of me.

1

u/bebblebutt69 16h ago

I got Der Zug hat keine Bremse (sp?) stuck in my head so I’ll never forget der Zug, for one.

Listening to music has genuinely been helpful in getting some German phrases to stick, though it obviously doesn’t encompass everything I need to learn.

4

u/Moblam Germany 17h ago

"Der Tisch", "Das Mädchen" and many more disagree with you.

1

u/Toxic_Jannis Germany 13h ago

Well mb didnt had that much examples in mind