The Awful German Language (1880)

Reading the article I guess Mark Twain never had a knowledgeable teacher. Is there anything hacker news readers would like to know about the German language?

Why do nouns have "random" articles attached to them? In latin languages like Portuguese the ending of the word tells you which article (masculine or feminine) to use, but in German only "die" has some rules. This is my biggest griped with the language and it's major flaw, when you pair that with adjective declensions and other sort of structures that rely on KNOWING which article to use.

From a foreign learners perspective, it is easier to just learn the article together with the noun.

But there are rules for 2/3 of cases. https://sprachekulturkommunikation.com/genus-der-substantive...

You can classify by suffix.

* -ung, -heit, -keit -> feminin, e.g. die Schönheit

* -ling -> masculin, e.g. der Flüchtling

* -chen, -lein -> neutrum, e.g das Mädchen

You can classify by category. Every alcoholic drink is masculin, except for beer.

You can classify by phonetic spelling. That is probably the closest you have to Portugese.

> Every alcoholic drink is masculine

- das Piña Colada

- die Bowle

- die Weißschorl (ÖD: der weiße Spritzer)