DURATION: 15 MINS

In this lecture I'll show you a wonderful technique that will help you memorize any noun's gender in 5 seconds or less. Obviously you'll need a bit of training to reach that speed, so let's get started right away:

Please imagine the following situations:

A | A Superhero has a long, grey beard that he plays with.
B | The Queen owns the worlds largest pink potato collection.
C | A big fat German baby is playing the piano.

Go through these examples once again. This time, make your image more vivid, add some mojo to your fantasy. The imagery has to be very remarkable. In German we say merk.würdig i.e. remember-worthy. Let me give you an example of what I mean:

I see the Queen standing in a giant room. That‘s the room in which she keeps her pink potatoes. Those potatoes are huge. She loves them. She caresses them. She breathes in the air of that room and I can smell what she smells: a strong potato scent.

Did you feel the difference? Add sensations and feelings to your imagination and you will never forget any article ever again. What article? Well, read on.

Explanation of the Technique

I hope you remember that there are three genders in German: masculine, neuter and feminine. Those mostly follow no logic and are therefore hard to remember. What I did with the Superhero, the Queen and the Baby was that I substituted the gender with a concrete, easy to visualize image. So now, whenever you learn a new noun, you simply add one of these three figures to the word‘s meaning and will memorize its gender easily. Take a look the examples from before:

• The Superhero had a beard. Beard is Bart in German. As it is connected now with superhero I know that it is masculine and can use the appropriate masculine articles. Yes, there are more of them but that‘s for dessert.
• Potato > Kartoffel is feminine as indicated by the Queen in our example.
• And, you might have guessed it already, piano > Klavier is neuter, given away by its connection with Baby.