Best way to store grammatical gender and articles
Many Indo-European languages have a concept of grammatical gender, where nouns can be masculine, feminine, or neuter. The most prominent languages with gender are German, French, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese. When adding nouns in such languages to Wokabulary, you should also record the gender, so you can easily look it up and practice it in the quiz.
The best way to do this is to add the word together with its article.
For example, record French words like “la maison” and German words like “der Garten”.
This has two major advantages:
- When you add the article, it can also be spoken by the speech output, which makes memorizing the gender easier.
- When quizzing the words you learn the article in a natural way as part of the word. So you practice the word just like you use it in writing and speech.
Tip
Wokabulary knows about articles and automatically ignores them when sorting.Attention
Some word lists from the web and even some books put the gender abrevated behind the word like “maison (f)” or “garten (m)”.This to facilitate alphabetic sorting but breaks speech output and makes learning the gender harder.