Is it "der Tisch" or "das Tisch"? Most beginner German language students know that noun articles "der, die and das" are very frustrating to learn! Below are some of the most common reasons why we have difficulty learning them, we will also give you a tip to helping you overcome them.

Step 1 - What is an article?

Here is an example of an English sentence without articles, "Yesterday I went to market and bought apple. I ate apple". As you can see, articles like "the", "a" and "an", are extremely important in the English language.

Step 2 - What is the importance of articles?

Why bother learning them? As shown in step 1, a sentence does not sound correct without articles. This is also the case for the German language, if you do not use the correct noun article, Germans will understand what you are saying, but it will not sound right. If you want to speak German well, it is important to correctly learn the articles.

Step 3 - Can Gender be relied on?

"der" is known as masculine, "die" is know as feminine "das" is known as neutral

One of the most common German mistakes made by English speakers, is to assume that everything "feminine" in nature should be labeled as "die" and so on.

Unfortunately, this is not the case, an example of this is 'der Tisch' (the table). As you can see, "the table" has been given the masculine "der" article. Here are another few examples, "das Bett" (the bed) is neutral, "der Stuhl" (the chair). Why is a bed neutral, a chair and a table masculine? It is clear that there is not a reliable pattern to finding the correct noun articles.

Step 4 - A picture paints a thousand words!

We now know that there is no actual rule to follow for German articles, we are now left to find learning strategies to try and help us memorize these articles and nouns. Using mnemonic Links are an extremely effective strategy to vastly improve your memorization. It is important to note, that you should learn the article and the noun together, not as separate words.

Here is one technique with proven results:

For every article we make up a symbol or picture in our head.

For the article "der" we will use something male, for instance "a man".

For "die" we can use a feminine image like "a woman".

For "das" let us try a neutral noun like "water"

If we need to learn the German word "the chair" - "der Stuhl", we could imagine "a man sitting on a stool", or something more memorable like "a man breaking a chair with a stool". We have associated the word "chair" with the word "stool" which sounds like the german word "Stuhl". Another example is "das haus" means "the hause" - Try imagining a house sinking in a pool of water, das haus.

As you can see, these phrases or pictures stay in our minds with little difficulty.

Conclusion - painting a picture in your mind helps you to remember thousands of words.

In the last step we used a mnemonic method to remember "The chair", I'm sure you can now remember it, "A man breaking a chair with a stool", "der Stuhl."

Paint a picture in your mind when you need to learn a noun with its article, make it as silly as you can and you will never forget it.