u/4languagesLulana

So you are talking away in German and you suddenly blank on an article. What can you do?

1. if the noun starts with GE- guess das. Again same accuracy and from same sources.

Memorize the following
Always feminine (die):
-heit, -keit, -ung, -schaft, -ei, -tion, -tat, -ik.
The mnemonic to remember is think
of a high king who rules the young and the shy. That is not really correct, the original uses ship but that didn’t resonate with me so I changed it to shy. This is how I remember it. High for heit, king for keit, young for ung and shy for schaft.
Or if you want to do in German the mnemonic is “ Heit, ung, keit, schaft sind Weiberhaft.”
Anyhow this is enough for today. I use KasusKnacker tirelessly until I know, that I really know an article. But languages change and evolve sometimes articles change over time.

Adjectives modify nouns. What does that mean? My grammar geniuses please ignore this part.
Nouns are what we are talking about. Usually things we can see, touch, talk about or feel. Our world is and to make sense of it, we have made up words to describe it. These words are nouns ( we choose to call them that) and describe or say something.
Of course, in pre—history we would point and grunt. Maybe one grunt was good and two grunts
was not good. I don‘t know I wasn‘t alive then. So adjectives describe the noun. The good man, the happy child, the salty meat.
But now we have evolved language. And not only language but uncountable languages. If you ever feel hopeless spend some time marveling at humans, their ingenuity and their creativity in formulating ways to express ourselves. We are wonderful.
Anyhow I digress. So this post was motivated by a question in the German subthread about how to change the ending of the describer or adjective to fit the sentence.

KasusKnacker made it easy. I‘m copying his/their explanation. It‘s all in the app. KasusKnacker owns all this.
German adjective endings (Adjektivendungen) change based on case, gender/number, and the article/determiner in front of the noun.
If you follow a simple checklist, they become predictable.

3-question checklist

1. Which case? (Nominativ / Akkusativ / Dativ / Genitiv)
2. Which gender/number? (der / die / das / plural)
3. Which article type? (der-words, ein-words, or no article)

If you want to know more download the app. Thanks to KasusKnacker I‘m more and more secure. Adjective declension is no more a problem. I am more confident and happier!

Banause

Schurke

Ganove

To learn a language one requires patience, hard work, good materials and an occasional speaking partner. All languages are difficult at the beginning. That is a universal truth. There are also only 24 hours in a day. In all my years learning German I never came across the above nouns.

Anyhow through KasusKnacker I‘ve come across several words that I didn‘t know. Rather, I know them in English but not German. Do you know them? And their articles?

I had paid for one of those new AI driven German language Apps. I started chatting away but made grammatical mistakes. Mostly using the correct cases. Even though, a correction is offered it is written and the chatting continues. The AI asks continuous questions in an never ending loop. Even when asked to repeat, it does and then goes back to asking more questions. After that I got frustrated and resigned myself to the lost money.

I kept asking myself what do I need? The simplest answer was to really fix my grammar. But before you jump, realize that I hear Swiss German but I have to answer in Standard German. And the reply to my answer is again in Swiss German or Mundart. Add to it that a lot of Swiss are shaky themselves in their German, it becomes a muddled situation. If you don’t believe me, go the Swiss German subreddit thread and see how much you understand.

Anyhow, I went back to App Store and found two grammar oriented apps. I downloaded both. One was too expensive. The other was KasusKnacker. Simple, easy to use, and it made perfect sense. I used it for free for two days. The KasusKnacker free version is actually quite generous AND has no ads!

I gladly paid the 20 for the app and proceeded to test myself. The Gender A1/A2 consists of 1205 Nouns. Without any help, just my memory, I did the whole section in a week and discovered that I had a lot of misgendered nouns or missing articles. This was a shock! If I don’t know the article, how can I then use the correct endings when cases change?

So download the app, use it in its free form and see if you are as perfect as you think you are in the basic German nouns. I challenge you!