Big off-topic question here, I'm sorry but I couldn't think of anywhere better to ask it!

Although the SRSing system is adapted here for Japanese, I'm interested in seeing if it could be adapted towards the European languages like French, German, Portuguese, etc.
However, a problem I can see with this is that these languages, unlike Chinese / Japanese have genders for nouns. I'm not convinced that going from German -> English and just doing recognition will help me learn the genders of various nouns, even though I may recognise them.

What's other people's opinion on this? Should I try to include other types of cards rather than just Recognition with sentences?

Definitely exposure. It's different in some languages but at least in Swedish, you can't look at a word and know which gender it is, at all, so there's not much else to do. The only way to know is to see it both in singular and plural... or with the "a" particle (which is "ett" and "en" depending on what gender in Swedish). But by having words in several situations in your SRS deck, you will get an automatic feeling for it.

Don't know about German but for French you can either develop a feel for masculine/feminine or post the masculine feminine articles along with the word.

Ex.

Front - le chat
back - cat
front - le gateux
back - cake

For words that can be either, depending on the situation, you can post m/f next the word.

Perhaps something like this can be adapted for German.

This is if you are just doing vocab alone thought.

Mr T Wrote:But by having words in several situations in your SRS deck, you will get an automatic feeling for it.

Yeah lots of sentences will give you that feel you need.

Although I don't know much lingustically about all of this, I like to think that the word + its 'gender' form is the actual word in its totality. There is no logical way you can know what gender a word is simply by looking at it (at least for Spanish and Arabic). You have to learn the word *with* its gender.

I didn't even notice Arabic was a gendered language until a friend of mine learning it pointed it out for me.

liosama Wrote:I didn't even notice Arabic was a gendered language until a friend of mine learning it pointed it out for me.

And I didn't learn Swedish was a gendered language until just before high school. If you get proper varied exposure, it's a non-issue really.

liosama Wrote:Although I don't know much lingustically about all of this, I like to think that the word + its 'gender' form is the actual word in its totality. There is no logical way you can know what gender a word is simply by looking at it (at least for Spanish and Arabic). You have to learn the word *with* its gender.

I didn't even notice Arabic was a gendered language until a friend of mine learning it pointed it out for me.

*emphasis added*
i beg to differ here, the gender of most words in spanish can easily be deduced by looking at the word:
casa -> fem (ends in a)
ordenador -> masc (does not end in a)
carro -> masc (ends in o)
agua -> fem
disco -> masc
sol -> masc

of course there are exceptions
idioma -> masc
flor -> fem
profesional -> both

but enough exposure should take care of those cases. merely writing the articles "el, la, los, las" with the words wouldn't be enough since there are some exceptions to article usage:
el agua -> fem, even though it uses "el", would need an adjective "el agua fría", or plural form "las aguas" to clarify.
la mar -> ambiguous, both "el mar" and "la mar" are correct (though it depends on the region).

in the end, it all goes back to... exposure... once you've read/heard the word in several contexts, its gender and usage will become clear. I don't think it would be any different with arabic, or french, or any other language with gendered nouns.

When I learned French I learned each vocabulary word with the 'la/le/un/une' in front of it, so that I memorized the word as a set rather than the word itself. I struggled with genders greatly at first, but after a while it wasn't much of a problem.