Constantin Vayenas Der, Die, Das: The Secrets of German Gender

This is a fascinating little book. I almost wish that I'd been able to acquire a copy when I started studying German over forty years ago. Learning the gender of every single noun under the sun appears to be a daunting task at first. Many years ago, I read about a student of the German language who hit upon the ingenious idea of using all nouns in the diminutive form, thereby obviating the problem. I doubt whether it was Mark Twain. He'd already decided that life wasn't long enough to learn German.This book lays down the principles that govern the gender of German nouns and explains the gender of whole groups of nouns. It could well be of interest to both native and non-native speakers of German. I'm certainly very pleased that I bought a copy. Better late than never.

Another book with great content, another book with poor "printed by Amazon" quality. Amazon's paper, print, and bind quality just does not justify the cost. Most others printers/binders provide a far better book-use experience as compared to this. Amazon should either gets its quality fixed or mention it clearly that the book will be printed by them so that customer can expect low quality binding, print, and paper.Great content by the author though. Very useful for new and and experienced learners.

I got this book for my boyfriend as he is just learning German and as a native speaker I know how hard it is to understand the German genders. Unfortunately this book is only for people who can already speak German to a good level. It does not provide a lot of English translation so it is basically useless for my boyfriend at this stage. I would still recommend it to advanced learners but I think they should mention that.

A very good reference book to help with solving the mysteries of how to identify what words are masculine, feminine and neuter.

There are controversial statements in the book, you have to have an advanced command of German to follow the narrative.