Perhaps you have difficulty eliciting goodwill in person, but you should have an easier time on an online forum since you do not have to worry about body language and you can review what you write before you post. Contrary to what you wrote, there are ways to improve your demeanor (and improve your communication skills in general) - the question is whether you are willing to exercise some self-discipline to get there. How about trying these:
Yea. Not even advice, but proven biological and psychological fact, practice makes permanent. Any skill not embedded in your genes can be learned, to a reasonable degree. drawing, playing a musical instrument, C++, and friendliness.
2. Communicate at your level. I believe people are generally willing to give leeway on what they consider to be appropriate behavior, but if you bust these unspoken limits, you are in for trouble. For example, in an earlier thread, you had strong words for @CrevsDaak about his views on life, and they were words that sounded like they came from a veteran in life instead of a teen. Like it or not, words of wisdom spoken by a 91-year old lose their power when spoken by a 19-year old, because you are not considered to have reached the stage in life that gives you the station and authority to speak them.
I speak the above from experience, though mine was a case of a 26-year old speaking to a 62-year old :P
That may be so, but I call dibs on being forum-cadderly.
That's probably one of the worst problems nowadays. I went to a library happily going to spend a 150$ pesos voucher a friend gave me for my birthday (plus some of my money), and happily spent them in some Michael Moorcock books I was looking after since several years ago. I checked in the computer/informatics section to see if there was anything about C or C++ (which I am trying to learn), and, found lots of books, guides and manuals about: Microsoft Office (eg powerpoint, excel, etc), how to use an iPhone 3GS (I have one, and it's VERY SIMPLE, like every software apple makes, it's very intuitive), and, a guide to........ Facebook.... and to twitter... I mean................... Is people SO degenerate? Pretty much that ended all my happiness.
1. @CrevsDaak there will always be stupid people. 'Tis a fact of life, that for there to be those who are great there must be this who are less. Do not despair; dumb people make the world go round. It frees up the smart people to do the important stuff. right?
2. You said library, I think you mean bookstore. You don't pay for things in libraries, at least in 'merica.
My own utter lack of charisma renders me unable to sway people with my words, mostly because my demeanor is so averse and alien to that of the average person I might as well call myself non-human. In general, no one likes me, and I like that fact - it's better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.
THAT is me IRL, I insult people for them not being intuitive, for not walking as fast as I do, for not being wise enough and take drugs... Pretty much for whatever I consider wrong *and* I don't do it myself. /end of derailing this thread.
Related to what I said above about learning skills, I hear you. I myself am trying to diminish my (surprising sizable, especially today [I had a sub-par day] ) Bealoth-side, and can particularly speak to the walking speed problem.
You, guys, are wonderful. I've got 43 notifications from this thread after just one week-end. It turns out BG gamers usually don't dump INT and WIS. In fact, it seems everyone here has solid rolls in INT, WIS and CHA!
Seriosly, I'm glad this topic has found its place on this forum.
You, guys, are wonderful. I've got 43 notifications from this thread after just one week-end. It turns out BG gamers usually don't dump INT and WIS. In fact, it seems everyone here has solid rolls in INT, WIS and CHA!
Seriosly, I'm glad this topic has found its place on this forum.
I always did like to think of myself as a cleric/mage.
Probably a dual-class, though, with some tomes added in to max my most scholarly stats. Practice really does make perfect, guys; when I think back to my first comments and experiences on the interwebs...
*shudders*
Those were some fun times, but I know I've made far more mistakes than I care to admit. >_>;; All that matters is that you learn from them.
@Squire, hah. After almost a year of studying Danish I have to tell you that in comparison, English is a walk in the park. I love Danish, but at the same time all the reasons for it give me frequent headaches. There are sounds that simply don't exist in my native language (besides stød, which is a nightmare and I feel like a goose trying to use it), with a special place for the highest Y. I'm terrified of going to Denmark one day and discovering I ordered killing instead of kylling (kitten instead of chicken), because year ago I couldn't even hear the difference. It's there, though.
There's my beloved mother tongue too, with all the lovely rustling sounds that are a nightmare to most foreigners and scarrry rolled RRR's:) At least our pronounciation is consistent with writing... The spelling is hard to learn for some, though. Mostly because we have sets of letters that sound the same, but look differently, for example: morze = sea może = maybe (also Pomorze = Pomerania, region in northern Poland pomoże = will help). I don't envy people who are trying to learn Polish...
I have to admit this thread is very useful to me, because I know my English is something to laugh at. I'm trying, though! I always have problems with double letters (necessary is a good example) and with where to put "a", "an" and "the", because I either write them with every noun or not at all.
I think there are problematic spellings, grammatical constructions, and pronunciations in all languages that are very hard for foreigners to get the hang of. Sometimes I think we who speak English as a native language get an incorrect or unbalanced impression of how hard our own language is. Really, they're all hard if you don't learn them at a young enough age.
I've dabbled in enough foreign languages (a lot of German and French, a tiny bit of Latin, Swedish, Italian, Russian, and Spanish) to realize this.
French, for example, is one of the easier languages for an Anglophone to learn how to read, but is notoriously difficult for an Anglophone to pronounce or aurally comprehend. I always had trouble with "faim" and "femme", meaning "hungry" and "woman/wife". You might be trying in a restaurant to say "J'ai faim (I'm hungry)", but if you pronounce it wrong, they'll hear "I have woman," or even "I woman."
You could be trying to order fish - "Je voudrais du poisson." - and wind up saying "I would like some poison." Hilarious examples like this of Americans trying to speak French abound.
BTW - I can't even remember the correct gender for "poisson", above, or whether it should be plural. So, my use of "du" might be incorrect. Plural would be "des", and feminine would be "de la". I *think* "du" is correct. Most European languages besides English have grammatical gender, and it drives Anglophones absolutely NUTS, I tell you. Imagine having to learn one of three grammatical genders going with every noun in the language, which is totally random, and affects the entire grammatical structure of every sentence. It's easy for native speakers, because they grew up with it. I find it almost impossible.
Gendered nouns in languages are one huge mess. It's no easier to learn if one's native language has them, believe me. For example, in Polish mouse is feminine, rat is masculine. In Spanish it's other way around and in German, if I remember correctly, both are feminine.
Basics of English are fairly easy to understand since there's no gendered nouns and any form of declination is residual. English has one grammatical form of the word "two", for example. In Polish, I think there are 17. Good luck, at least it's not Finnish (which is another language I really want to learn. And Icelandic).
From my experience, Americans are some of the worst English speakers I've encountered. Gendered. Lund are a pain in my ass, along with prepositions. WHY DO YOU PEOPLE HAVE 15 WAYS TO SAY 'THE'???!!!!!
@meagloth, during the periods of time that Old and Middle English were spoken, there were 23 (or more). Several are now considered archaic and obsolete. My assumption is that, like those poor vowels that Americans decided to discriminate against and leave out of certain words (just joking), they simply dropped a number of them. After a number of years, they were dropped entirely.
@meagloth, during the periods of time that Old and Middle English were spoken, there were 23 (or more). Several are now considered archaic and obsolete. My assumption is that, like those poor vowels that Americans decided to discriminate against and leave out of certain words (just joking), they simply dropped a number of them. After a number of years, they were dropped entirely.
Very insightful, but I was actually asking were gendered nouns came from, not were they went. Kudos on your logical deduction though. You'd think sense I'm already in the internet I could look it up myself, but apparently I'm to lazy to open a new tab.
@meagloth, where they came from? I suppose any answer would also be dependent upon the sense you are referring to. More logical deduction: look at the languages that form the basis of English. :-)
French, Teutonic, Latin (with some derivative semi-modern Italian), Spanish, Norse and Danish. Quite a large number of non-English languages are gendered, that's where it came from. A better question lies not in asking about it in the history of the English language, rather asking about it from those of other languages.
If I may - as a linguist, I know a lot of language history and structures:
The gendered languages are the norm - not an exception, due to the fact that all european languages (save for Basque, which developed entirely separately, and is much more ancient than the rest) come from proto-indo-european, a language that originated in India thousands of years ago - which is why we can find similarities between all of them - I could spend all night citing examples, but due to their sheer complexity I'll rather not. Suffice it to say that all of the grammatical structures present in European languages have a common root in their ancestral language, gendering being no exception. If anything, English evolved (or devolved) past the need of gendering, but its archaic form - Anglisc - did feature such concept - it hasn't even been a thousand years since English dropped such linguistic faculties.
Now about the discussion centered on myself: On the topic of age - people mature differently, my brother-in-law, for instance, is much less mature than I am - frequently calling me, somewhat derogatorily, "Mr. Lucas" since I have met him (he's American and much less... intellectually developed than I am - my (step)sister and he followed on my mother's footsteps and became cooks (my mother, though a photography major, currently works as a pastry chef)) when I was 16. He's currently 29 and regards me as a crank. People are always products of their mediums - as I was raised in foster care under the tutelage of my very strict muslim aunt, I was forced to mature quickly, lest I perished (which I almost did, considering I attempted suicide twice). I remember having to endure things such as praying to whatever god they followed while kneeled on dry corn, which served to temper my mind and further develop my ability to ignore the environment and enter trance. Of course, when I passed my exams and was admitted into university, I left that life (I also held a ritualistic burning of the Qu'ran - signifying my emancipation from it) and focused myself on another - that of a teacher. I was exposed to the many hardships of a social darwinistic institution with dropout rates as high as 60% as well as having to associate myself with societies I was introduced to while in foster care (I was not even considered a person before associating with Mensa, because in my aunt's eyes those who have no merits don't exist under the eyes of god) left me a broken mess at the start - I had no social experience because I had no social life, literally being kept from exiting the house under the threat of being abandoned on the street for anything other than going to school - indeed, 3 years of my life were spent that way, which left me socially inept and easily impressed at the grandness of society. I formed my own character from the things I was taught - from educational sociology and psychology, literary theories, news collages, reports from exchange students and the like. I spent this early start at true life on the internet taking various façades of people I was not, exercising my newfound ability to communicate and also to learn how people held their lives - of course, this meant being banned monthly from every forum I joined due to the fact I had no idea how to handle myself in social situations. Still tinged with the stains of a highly conservative upbringing I assumed everyone had similar values - over time I learned to abandon such precepts and find myself as my own person, which of course meant exploring things I had admonished - and this seems to have worked out for the best. I literally have no real values aside from those - I could never procure anything else. So to complement your statements, I guess I have little experience - but the experiences I had put me at a much higher level of maturity than those normal people had. Hells, some of my students are actually older than me and most of them would never guess my true age (I look much older than I am, particularly my eyes, which seem to be always locked at 'thousand-yard-stare mode' due to autism - my old-ass glasses also do me no favors in lessening that effect - acne scars and racial ambiguity also render people unable to guess how old I am. My ex-boyfriend guessed I was around 30 once - I was 18 at the time).
I studied German for a few years as a third language, and I hated having to memorize the gender of nouns even though it was integral to grammatical accuracy. It did not help that the gender assignments were quite arbitrary - how was one to know the gender of an inanimate object?
My other first language is Chinese, and I prefer it to English because of its simplicity - no tenses and no noun genders! ^_^
It's used to express mild surprise, hesitation, approval, disapproval, or impatience:
why, here's what I was looking for
why, what a strange thing to say!
Why derives from Old English hwæt, the first word of ‘Beowulf’, where it is used to attract the attention of the listeners, so it is perhaps not surprising to find it used in contexts such as these.
There's also a point of view that the extra why in "Why, thank you" is used mainly to avoid appearing too abrupt in one's thankfulness.
Also, the use of "why" is not archaic. It is commonly used to add emphasis to what follows, especially if there is some sense of contradiction to what went before, or if the following words should be considered obvious and self-evident.
Mary said she didn't know we were leaving for Paris on Thursday? Why, she's the one who bought the tickets!
I've also found this presumption: it's not "why", it's an old south colloquialism for the contraction formed from "well I" Yielding "w'i"
If I may - as a linguist, I know a lot of language history and structures:
The gendered languages are the norm - not an exception, due to the fact that all european languages (save for Basque, which developed entirely separately, and is much more ancient than the rest) come from proto-indo-european, a language that originated in India thousands of years ago - which is why we can find similarities between all of them - I could spend all night citing examples, but due to their sheer complexity I'll rather not.
As a future (I certainly hope so!) linguist focusing on Nordic region of Europe, I feel I have to add to this. While it's true that most of the languages come from proto-indo-european root, there's a small group of proto-ural languages as well. Most notable examples are Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian as well as minority languages, such as Saami and Karelian.
It's interesting to me that the four Gaelic languages are only loosely connected, and Scots Gaelic and Irish Gaelic are more related than to Welsh Gaelic (Welsh Gaelic is more closely related to Breton/Bretagne, which is spoken in one of the northernmost regions of France). For example, "My heart" in Scots Gaelic is "Mo Chride" where as in Welsh Gaelic it's "Fy Calon". (Interestingly enough, "My Hero" is Welsh Gaelic is "Fy Arwyr", which makes me think of King Arthur. ) And Irish and Scots Gaelic is also related to Manx.
@Shandyr, the reverse of what you wrote about Germans learning to use the present perfect in English is also true for Anglophones learning German. It's hard for us to get used to using the present perfect in place of past tense in most sentences, especially since the present perfect construction is more complicated to conjugate, and German is filled with irregular past participles.
Subordinate clauses require inverted word order, which means we have to think of the past participle, and then hold it in memory until the last word of the sentence. One teacher once told us, if we wanted to say "I think that (something in the past tense happened)...", it would be better to leave out the "that", so we could avoid inverted word order constructions.
Memorizing gender is also very hard, as we've said, and German noun declensions are very complex and difficult to learn for a non-native. It gets even more complicated by the so-called "weak" nouns, which have their own, irregular declensions, and it's hard to remember which nouns are "weak". I would say my most frequent error in German is to choose the wrong article, from forgetting the gender, or whether it is a weak noun.
@BelgarathMTH I admit if I was non-german I wouldn't want to learn that language xD
What do you think is harder to learn: German or French?
I would guess that its relatively equally hard for someone who doesn't speak either but I'm not sure.
@Shandyr@BelgarathMTH in my high school, German is usually considered the easiest of the three languages(Spanish, German, French) I cannot speak to the truth of that, as I have only taken German.(though I signed up for French:P). We also have a Japanese class but only the crazy anime kids that wear animal ears or tails to school or whatever take that, so I have not even heard anything about how hard it is, and sense we've been talking romantic languages, it's not particularly relevant.
On a separate note, to us English speakers(especially the middle schoolers) gendered nouns are hilarious. Why would you assign a random "gender" to a word? In middle school German it was a big deal that the German word for skirt,(clothing item) Der Rock, was masculine.
Having taken all three, (Spanish from 1st to 9th grade, German & French afterward), I can definitively say German was the hardest for me to learn—in fact I never did. This despite my dad being fluent.
@jackjack, huh, that interesting. I wonder if it a etcher thing then. My middle school German teacher was very good(she got the while class to sing her dumb songs. I've never seen a teacher get the whole class to sing before.) though she hated grammar and now I'm behind in high school German, with a grammar-loving teacher, and a "high school level class" whatever that means. Sorry, I should stop venting. I have teacher-relation issues in that class.
I studied German for a few years as a third language, and I hated having to memorize the gender of nouns even though it was integral to grammatical accuracy. It did not help that the gender assignments were quite arbitrary - how was one to know the gender of an inanimate object?
It's the same in spanish, which makes it a little bit more complicated than english. Learning german from spanish is relatively easier than from english.
@Shandyr, I found French much easier to learn to read and write grammatically, but German much easier to learn to aurally comprehend and to speak with a halfway decent accent, allowing a native listener to understand me easily. (I've had native French speakers say they couldn't understand me at all, while I've had native German speakers compliment me on my accent.)
French noun declensions were relatively simple for me because there are really only two genders, since masculine and neuter use the same article. You only have to memorize whether the noun takes "le" or "la". The plural of both is "les", and the "of" contractions that go with them are "du", "de la", and "des". They don't even change according to case, so you don't have to worry about what function the nouns are serving in your sentence constructions. The indefinite singular articles are always either "un" or "une", so you've got at least a 50-50 chance to be right if you have to take a guess.
German noun declensions are a nightmare for a non-native speaker. (I studied classical Greek, and it was the same thing in that language.) You not only have to know the gender, you have to know what case your noun is being used in, and whether it is a "weak" noun. Both the definite and indefinite articles are fully declined, so there's "der", "das", "die", "den", "dem" "des", "ein", "eine", "einem", "einen", etc, and then you have to put an "-en" suffix on the weak nouns in certain cases. Oh yes, and any adjectives also have to be declined to match the nouns.
As if that weren't enough, all the personal prounouns are fully declined: "mein", "meine", "meinen", "meinem", "dein", "deine", "deinen", deinem", etc., on and on it goes.
I'll never forget an experience I had in college when the teacher got a group of German tourists to visit one of our classes and attend a luncheon with us German students. I tried to go up to a pair of ladies and smile and say "Thank you for the visit." Unfortunately, I had to take a guess at the gender of "Besuch", and I guessed wrong. I said "Danke fuer das Besuch." Both ladies immediately burst out laughing and said in unison, "Danke fuer DEN Besuch!" It was like they couldn't help themselves, I had made such a silly sounding error. It probably made me seem two years old to them.
Both ladies immediately burst out laughing and said in unison, "Danke fuer DEN Besuch!" It was like they couldn't help themselves, I had made such a silly sounding error. It probably made me seem two years old to them.
Somewhat topical on the French side (British comedian, so possibly offensive—just a wanring). Skip to somewhere near the halfway mark (0:42 should be close enough).
Comments
2. You said library, I think you mean bookstore. You don't pay for things in libraries, at least in 'merica. Related to what I said above about learning skills, I hear you. I myself am trying to diminish my (surprising sizable, especially today [I had a sub-par day] ) Bealoth-side, and can particularly speak to the walking speed problem.
More pretentious too
Seriosly, I'm glad this topic has found its place on this forum.
Probably a dual-class, though, with some tomes added in to max my most scholarly stats. Practice really does make perfect, guys; when I think back to my first comments and experiences on the interwebs...
*shudders*
Those were some fun times, but I know I've made far more mistakes than I care to admit. >_>;; All that matters is that you learn from them.
I've dabbled in enough foreign languages (a lot of German and French, a tiny bit of Latin, Swedish, Italian, Russian, and Spanish) to realize this.
French, for example, is one of the easier languages for an Anglophone to learn how to read, but is notoriously difficult for an Anglophone to pronounce or aurally comprehend. I always had trouble with "faim" and "femme", meaning "hungry" and "woman/wife". You might be trying in a restaurant to say "J'ai faim (I'm hungry)", but if you pronounce it wrong, they'll hear "I have woman," or even "I woman."
You could be trying to order fish - "Je voudrais du poisson." - and wind up saying "I would like some poison." Hilarious examples like this of Americans trying to speak French abound.
BTW - I can't even remember the correct gender for "poisson", above, or whether it should be plural. So, my use of "du" might be incorrect. Plural would be "des", and feminine would be "de la". I *think* "du" is correct. Most European languages besides English have grammatical gender, and it drives Anglophones absolutely NUTS, I tell you.
Basics of English are fairly easy to understand since there's no gendered nouns and any form of declination is residual. English has one grammatical form of the word "two", for example. In Polish, I think there are 17. Good luck, at least it's not Finnish (which is another language I really want to learn. And Icelandic).
French, Teutonic, Latin (with some derivative semi-modern Italian), Spanish, Norse and Danish. Quite a large number of non-English languages are gendered, that's where it came from. A better question lies not in asking about it in the history of the English language, rather asking about it from those of other languages.
The gendered languages are the norm - not an exception, due to the fact that all european languages (save for Basque, which developed entirely separately, and is much more ancient than the rest) come from proto-indo-european, a language that originated in India thousands of years ago - which is why we can find similarities between all of them - I could spend all night citing examples, but due to their sheer complexity I'll rather not. Suffice it to say that all of the grammatical structures present in European languages have a common root in their ancestral language, gendering being no exception. If anything, English evolved (or devolved) past the need of gendering, but its archaic form - Anglisc - did feature such concept - it hasn't even been a thousand years since English dropped such linguistic faculties.
Now about the discussion centered on myself:
On the topic of age - people mature differently, my brother-in-law, for instance, is much less mature than I am - frequently calling me, somewhat derogatorily, "Mr. Lucas" since I have met him (he's American and much less... intellectually developed than I am - my (step)sister and he followed on my mother's footsteps and became cooks (my mother, though a photography major, currently works as a pastry chef)) when I was 16. He's currently 29 and regards me as a crank.
People are always products of their mediums - as I was raised in foster care under the tutelage of my very strict muslim aunt, I was forced to mature quickly, lest I perished (which I almost did, considering I attempted suicide twice). I remember having to endure things such as praying to whatever god they followed while kneeled on dry corn, which served to temper my mind and further develop my ability to ignore the environment and enter trance. Of course, when I passed my exams and was admitted into university, I left that life (I also held a ritualistic burning of the Qu'ran - signifying my emancipation from it) and focused myself on another - that of a teacher. I was exposed to the many hardships of a social darwinistic institution with dropout rates as high as 60% as well as having to associate myself with societies I was introduced to while in foster care (I was not even considered a person before associating with Mensa, because in my aunt's eyes those who have no merits don't exist under the eyes of god) left me a broken mess at the start - I had no social experience because I had no social life, literally being kept from exiting the house under the threat of being abandoned on the street for anything other than going to school - indeed, 3 years of my life were spent that way, which left me socially inept and easily impressed at the grandness of society.
I formed my own character from the things I was taught - from educational sociology and psychology, literary theories, news collages, reports from exchange students and the like. I spent this early start at true life on the internet taking various façades of people I was not, exercising my newfound ability to communicate and also to learn how people held their lives - of course, this meant being banned monthly from every forum I joined due to the fact I had no idea how to handle myself in social situations. Still tinged with the stains of a highly conservative upbringing I assumed everyone had similar values - over time I learned to abandon such precepts and find myself as my own person, which of course meant exploring things I had admonished - and this seems to have worked out for the best.
I literally have no real values aside from those - I could never procure anything else.
So to complement your statements, I guess I have little experience - but the experiences I had put me at a much higher level of maturity than those normal people had. Hells, some of my students are actually older than me and most of them would never guess my true age (I look much older than I am, particularly my eyes, which seem to be always locked at 'thousand-yard-stare mode' due to autism - my old-ass glasses also do me no favors in lessening that effect - acne scars and racial ambiguity also render people unable to guess how old I am. My ex-boyfriend guessed I was around 30 once - I was 18 at the time).
My other first language is Chinese, and I prefer it to English because of its simplicity - no tenses and no noun genders! ^_^
I've checked the meaning of this phrase and the difference between it and "Thank you".
According to http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/why , why as an interjection is used at the beginning of a statement especially to express surprise
It's used to express mild surprise, hesitation, approval, disapproval, or impatience:
why, here's what I was looking for
why, what a strange thing to say!
Why derives from Old English hwæt, the first word of ‘Beowulf’, where it is used to attract the attention of the listeners, so it is perhaps not surprising to find it used in contexts such as these.
There's also a point of view that the extra why in "Why, thank you" is used mainly to avoid appearing too abrupt in one's thankfulness.
Also, the use of "why" is not archaic. It is commonly used to add emphasis to what follows, especially if there is some sense of contradiction to what went before, or if the following words should be considered obvious and self-evident.
Mary said she didn't know we were leaving for Paris on Thursday? Why, she's the one who bought the tickets!
I've also found this presumption: it's not "why", it's an old south colloquialism for the contraction formed from "well I" Yielding "w'i"
Subordinate clauses require inverted word order, which means we have to think of the past participle, and then hold it in memory until the last word of the sentence. One teacher once told us, if we wanted to say "I think that (something in the past tense happened)...", it would be better to leave out the "that", so we could avoid inverted word order constructions.
Memorizing gender is also very hard, as we've said, and German noun declensions are very complex and difficult to learn for a non-native. It gets even more complicated by the so-called "weak" nouns, which have their own, irregular declensions, and it's hard to remember which nouns are "weak". I would say my most frequent error in German is to choose the wrong article, from forgetting the gender, or whether it is a weak noun.
On a separate note, to us English speakers(especially the middle schoolers) gendered nouns are hilarious. Why would you assign a random "gender" to a word? In middle school German it was a big deal that the German word for skirt,(clothing item) Der Rock, was masculine.
Learning german from spanish is relatively easier than from english.
French noun declensions were relatively simple for me because there are really only two genders, since masculine and neuter use the same article. You only have to memorize whether the noun takes "le" or "la". The plural of both is "les", and the "of" contractions that go with them are "du", "de la", and "des". They don't even change according to case, so you don't have to worry about what function the nouns are serving in your sentence constructions. The indefinite singular articles are always either "un" or "une", so you've got at least a 50-50 chance to be right if you have to take a guess.
German noun declensions are a nightmare for a non-native speaker. (I studied classical Greek, and it was the same thing in that language.) You not only have to know the gender, you have to know what case your noun is being used in, and whether it is a "weak" noun. Both the definite and indefinite articles are fully declined, so there's "der", "das", "die", "den", "dem" "des", "ein", "eine", "einem", "einen", etc, and then you have to put an "-en" suffix on the weak nouns in certain cases. Oh yes, and any adjectives also have to be declined to match the nouns.
As if that weren't enough, all the personal prounouns are fully declined: "mein", "meine", "meinen", "meinem", "dein", "deine", "deinen", deinem", etc., on and on it goes.
I'll never forget an experience I had in college when the teacher got a group of German tourists to visit one of our classes and attend a luncheon with us German students. I tried to go up to a pair of ladies and smile and say "Thank you for the visit." Unfortunately, I had to take a guess at the gender of "Besuch", and I guessed wrong. I said "Danke fuer das Besuch." Both ladies immediately burst out laughing and said in unison, "Danke fuer DEN Besuch!" It was like they couldn't help themselves, I had made such a silly sounding error. It probably made me seem two years old to them.