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Vocabulary Practice for Gendered Nouns

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(@astera)
Posts: 2
Active Member
Topic starter
 

Hi everyone,

I’m back with another suggestion that’s similar to my last one. It’s also about vocabulary practice, but from a slightly different perspective.

For languages with gendered nouns such as French and German, learning new vocabulary is a two-step process, yet many apps amalgamate this into one step. First step, learn the word, then you learn the gender. While you might learn them together, it’s easy to forget one part when you’re testing yourself.

It’s pretty annoying getting a question wrong because you remembered the correct word but forgot the correct article or vice versa. To address this, it would be great to have a vocabulary practice feature that separates these two elements. For example:

ย 

  • noun (some languages stop here)
  • noun + article (some languages stop here)

ย 

For languages like German that have even more articles for different cases and plurals, extra levels could be added after these basic two. This approach would help to strengthen the connection between noun and gender, so that learners can make grammatically-correct sentences sooner.

I vaguely remember that years ago, Duolingo used to have a sort of flashcard feature. In German I used to mess up my answers because of the gendered articles all the time. In another non-gendered language, the same activity was easier because I only had to focus on the word itself. (It might not have been flashcards specifically, but it was a type of vocabulary exercise; I’ve used Duolingo for 10 years, so seen a lot of iterations of it. They never used to have streak freezes!)

What does everyone think? Any suggestions for how to improve such a feature, such as adding colours or icons? I’d like to hear your thoughts.

ย 

 
Posted : 04/01/2025 5:27 am
Fuchsteufel
(@fuchsteufel)
Posts: 4
New Member
 

There could be one or two lessons focussing on the gender of nouns for every skill, especially those being taught in that skill. So there’d be sentences like:

___ voiture ne peut pas danser.

  • Le
  • La
  • Les
  • Des

or

___ Auto kann nicht tanzen.

  • Der
  • Die
  • Das
  • Eine

Thus the proper article is memorized with the word.

 
Posted : 04/01/2025 3:23 pm
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