Walter's Famous German Language Essentials Guide

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 28 April 2016 at 06:43:52 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
> On 27 April 2016 at 13:25, Marco Leise via Digitalmars-d 
> <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>> Am Wed, 27 Apr 2016 03:59:04 +0000
>> schrieb Seb <seb at wilzba.ch>:
>>
>>> nitpick: Wo ist _das_ WC?
>>> In German WC we have definite articles and as a WC can be 
>>> used by
>>> both sexes, it is neutral (disclaimer: not a rule).
>>
>> There are some reasons why some words are feminine, masculine 
>> or neutral, but I never heard of that. (It is short form for 
>> English "watercloset" - which I didn't know before I looked it 
>> up now. :D)
>>
>
> Ha!  There is no logical at all behind whether a word is 
> masculine, feminine or neutral in German.

Except when it corresponds to the natural gender, i.e. der Mann, 
die Frau. It's interesting that the word for child is neuter (das 
Kind). Looks like children are not yet considered to be of any 
sex, which makes a lot of sense.

Anyway, you can often deduce the grammatical gender from the 
ending (like in French, Spanish etc). E.g. -keit is feminine, 
while nouns ending in -er are masculine

die Eitelkeit (vanity)
der Fahrer (the driver)

Once you understand this, you can focus on words that give you no 
clue, like der Tag (day).

But in general there is no obvious logic as to why a word is 
masculine or feminine (or neuter). In German the sun is feminine, 
while in Latin languages it's masculine (el sol, o sol). In 
English it's neuter like most things. A neutered race :)