In Jemandes Fustapfen Treten

in jemandes Fußstapfen treten

literally: to step in someone's footsteps

to follow the path of one's predecessor

Translate me unfaithfully. Translate me adulterously. Translate me and leave a stray hair or a forgotten lipstick stain to tell the audience you have been here.

Hi, do you know any strategies for learning the gender of German words? I'm Italian and I know Latin and Greek, so I'm not foreign to the concept of gendered words, I just find that German words give very little help to guess if they are feminine, masculine or neutral.

Thanks a lot and have a good time being a TA

Hallo! We just tell our students to memorise the genders but there are actually some general patterns! This isn't foolproof though because there are always exceptions in German:

Masculine: male people/jobs, days/months/seasons and most times of day (except for night), cars and trains, nouns derived from verbs without ending, a lot of nouns ending in –ant, –ling, –ner, –or, –m, –en, –er, –ismus, -ast, -ich, -ig,

Feminine: female people/jobs, numbers, ships and motorcycles, a lot of nouns derived from verbs ending in -t, lots of nouns ending in –heit, –keit, –ik, –schaft, –ur, –ität, –ung, –e, –ei, –enz, –ie, –ion, –anz, –in

Neuter: diminutives in -chen and -lein, colours, a lot of nouns starting in ge-, nouns derived from infinitives and adjectives, letters of the alphabet, a lot of English loan words, most fractions, a lot of nouns ending in –ment, –nis, –o, –um, –tum, -icht, -ma, -sal

Again: for every rule in German there's usually more exceptions. Mark Twain wrote an entire essay about this. We even have words where no one can agree on the correct article (like Nutella) or where several are correct.

Compound words take the article of the last noun eg die Armbanduhr because it's die Uhr even though it's der Arm and das Band.

The good news is that even if you get it wrong people will generally understand you.

in german we don’t say “i wanna go apeshit”, we say “ich werd gleich fuchsteufelswild” which mean i’m gonna go fox devil wild, and I think that’s feral as fuck

german resource spotlight: ard audiothek

are you an intermediate or advanced german learner looking for listening practice? ard audiothek is a website and app containing dozens of podcasts, radio shows, and audiobooks to listen to for free! you can even download content to listen to offline. for literature fans, check out kafkas kosmos, a series of kafka's short stories. if you're looking for something more simple, have a look at the children's section. there's something for everyone!

auf Gedeih und Verderb

literally: for prospering or decay

for better or worse

Origin: From Low German legal language of the Middle Ages.