Avoid this avoidable learning mistake

Why Gender Matters

Having to learn hundreds of new words just so you can express the most basic ideas can be a frustrating task. This is what leads some students to take a shortcut that often costs them dearly in the long run.

Just like in German, there are three genders in Luxembourgish: Feminine, Masculine and Neutral. But for many, just learning the new vocabulary items seems more than enough work, which is why they are tempted to ignore the words’ assigned gender for the time being and focus only on the word itself. Unfortunately, not learning the correct gender of a word has far-reaching ramifications for the rest of your studies.

For instance, as soon as you have to build sentences that include dative-structures (referring to an indirect object), not knowing the right gender means you’re kind of screwed if uttering a natural sounding sentence is of importance to you (though rarely will it affect the recipients understanding of your sentence).
Let’s say you want to express the following: I give the dog a cookie. Supposing you are unsure of the gender assigned to the word dog and you choose feminine instead of masculine, the sentence you utter will be: Ech ginn der Hond ee Kichelchen. This will sound somewhat strange to a Luxembourger, who is used to hearing: Ech ginn dem Hond ee Kichelchen.

Is Luxembourgish more difficult than German?

Remember when I said that there are three genders in German and Luxembourgish? Well, here is where things get complicated. Yes, in German you will find three determined articles der, die, das.
However, Luxembourgers thought “Hey, why not make it harder by just using two articles instead of three, so it is even more difficult for students to know the correct gender when they hear a new word.”.

So in Luxembourgish we only have two determined articles: den and d’ and een and eng (for undetermined words). Now what was left out? You guessed correctly, the article for gender-neutral words. What do we do now, you might ask. Do we just use one of the other two for neutral words?
Well, that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?

What we do in Luxembourgish is the following: When a neutral word is determined, we use the feminine article d’ as in: d’Kand and when the word is not determined, we use the masculine article een as in: ee Kand.

Not as easy as you think

Now, if you are someone who knows German, you might say: “Easy, so I know the word is neutral in German so it surely must be in Luxembourgish as well. (As in our example: das Kind)
Well, no. Unfortunately that is not always the case. Take the words “Restaurant” for example. In German they say das Restaurant (neutral) whereas in Luxembourgish we say De Restaurant (masculine). This might stem from the fact that the word is of latin origin and in French the assigned gender is also the masculine one (le restaurant).

So for all of these reasons, please do not just learn the words themselves but also remember their gender. You can also find it by consulting a Luxembourgish dictionary. It might not affect whether you are understood or not but if your aim is to speak like a native, then remember this advice.