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After I found this really really helpful youtube channel that has subtitles and different topics in different ways to learning this fun. I then found other videos from this channel, such as a lady exploring Taipei in Taiwan which is one of my favourite countries in the world, and a video about all the cases in German.
I struggled to grasp all the cases in German as i started classes late, so this really helped to see how they were used as they use them with real life objects too, and I can visualise the use of the cases better.
Listening and reading both the german and english subtitles is a method i've realised is really useful for me, as I can also match the words they're saying with how to spell them. I later watched a few more from this channel as I really enjoyed their content, and have been learning so many new words and terms, and also helping me grasp ones we've been through in class. I think i will continue to use this channel as it has been the most useful thing i have found whilst learning german so far.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbWOui-V-U4&index=12&list=PLk1fjOl39-50WX8xiXwIBUcbdtMjlaZSj

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When I was looking for extra sources to help me get used to listening to German, I came across this beginner listening video. I found it really helped to test myself with it and again just familiarise myself with the pronunciation.  I repeated back everything they said, even if i didn't really know what it was at first.
On the suggested videos, i then found a really great youtube channel that focus on teaching german and clarifying things, but using real life things and go to different places outside to explain and show. Overall, I learnt the most common mistakes so could be mindful of what to avoid too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDaYbhrmLNk&list=PLk1fjOl39-50WX8xiXwIBUcbdtMjlaZSj&index=31

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23 Minutes of German Listening Comprehension for Absolute Beginner

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As I was looking through the internet for basic german words such as animals and food etc, I wondered how german would be with different kinds of cats, to be more specific. I found this when I was writing the email for my essential homework 2, and was going to maybe mention my cat in it, but wasn't sure how to say her breed. I thought this was quite interesting as i didnt really expect there to be much different, but some are. From this, I further explored this website and looked at other vocabulary too for about 30-40 minutes. The layout of this was also helpful and helped me clearly learn and revise this information later on. http://www.happychild.org.uk/freeway/german/vocab/catsoverview.htm

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German vocabulary - free worksheets - face, skin, makeup, cleansing - index to English and German words

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German vocabulary - free worksheets - face, skin, makeup, cleansing - index to English and German words - at FREEWAY and Project HappyChild

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gendered german words and suitable pronouns

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gendered german words and suitable pronouns

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As i'm very passionate about topics and issues related to the LGBTQ+ community, I noticed that as so many words in German are gendered, how do German people address themselves if they don't identify with a binary gender? In order words, how can they say 'i'm a student' without choosing either the male or female version of that noun, when they don't identify with either? I wanted to find out more about this area, how trans people can navigate the world using the german language, what words and ways they can use to express themselves, hopefully learn these to better educate myself, and generally how german is used around this topic. As these sources are from the internet, I can't be sure everything in these sources are correct, but i thought atleast trying to learn some of the words used in german can atleast be the start to this. I read through both articles and several more online, and familiarised myself with the terms they use in german and learnt these. Overall, although i cant be entirely sure if this information is correct or not (but i'd hope it is anyway) it has been really useful that I explored this part of the german language a bit more as a start.

https://wunder2welt.wordpress.com/2017/08/25/transgender-terminology-in-german/

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by Léah Miller
I. Introduction
Within a grammatically gendered language like German, it is difficult to make space for those who fall outside of or in between male and female, masculine and feminine. Although feminists have long been battling over male-dominant language (see Bodine, Sato et. al, and Sarrasin et. al), nonbinary and genderqueer subjects have not been a part of that conversation-at least not in the canon of academic writing. With this invisibility and the potential impossibility of gender-neutrality in grammatically gendered languages, it is that much more difficult for genderqueer people to break out of the binary and find their home in language. In this paper, I plan to give visibility to the issue and highlight voices that have been largely absent, namely nonbinary and genderqueer people. The scope of this research was not to mine the German language to find conclusive evidence to support a firm hypothesis, but rather to approach the topic with curiosity, via the personal narratives of a small handful of Germans, and to ask further questions that will expand the current conversation into greater inclusivity. While linguistic laboratory studies provide significant data, this paper takes a more personal and individual approach.
II. How do German speakers understand the relationship between semantic and grammatical gender?
I spoke to ten native German speakers of various gender and sexual identities to talk about their relationship to gender. As an English-speaking nonbinary researcher, I was curious as to how Germans understand the connection between grammatical and semantic gender, and how that might (if at all) affect their sense of gender identity. The interviews were conducted almost entirely in English, although German was used when talking about the specific words in question. Though I spoke to Germans with a variety of gender identities, I was particularly eager to talk to nonbinary and genderqueer Germans to get their first-hand perspective on the issue.

To begin with, I asked the subjects how and when they learned German grammar. I predicted that the native speakers would not remember actively learning grammatical gender and the various complexities of German grammar; nevertheless, I wanted my subjects to confirm this belief themselves. While they usually remembered taking grammar lessons in primary school, they all confirmed that the lessons just reiterated and made official what they already knew and had internalized. Most of them chuckled at the idea of getting the grammatical gender of nouns wrong as adults; those mistakes belonged to children and occasionally confusing neologisms and foreign loaner words, like "Blog" or "Nutella." Bertha, a cisgender German language professor at NYU with a degree in psycholinguistics said:

If I get it wrong on inanimate things, there's no connotation to it other than that it's funny, and I don't know, I'm not paying attention. It's cute when little kids do it. They do it all the time. Because the declination system that interacts with it is so complex, it takes little kids a long time to learn it, and then they inflect the articles wrong, and to us, that's cute. It just means that they haven't worked the system long enough yet to know how it works. But it's not funny because you're implying that a table is feminine, it's just funny cause you don't get it right.

In the above quote, Bertha confirms that grammatical gender has little to no relation to semantic gender. It is natural to her that a table uses the er [he] pronoun, but it does not mean that it is masculine in the same way that her son is masculine. On the topic of learning grammar in school, Elsa, a cisgender dramaturge and theatre professor, said, "it was naturalized, but for me specifically, it was like 'ah, now I know what it is and now it makes sense;' [...] it was basically just an affirmation of the way that I spoke." I had anticipated a lot of the answers that the subjects gave about their basic interactions with their native tongue, but it was nevertheless important to have the confirmation.

As a native English speaker in the process of learning gendered languages like German and French, I have always paid attention to the seemingly arbitrary grammatical gender assigned to every noun. I make connections between semantic and grammatical gender and notice idiosyncrasies all the time and I wondered if native German speakers did the same. Bassetti discusses how the assignment of gender is largely due to the phonological or morphological attributes of nouns, and sometimes even conflicts with the possible semantic gender. Despite this, she cites studies that show how native speakers "perceive feminine characteristics in referents of grammatically feminine nouns and masculine characteristics in referents of grammatically masculine nouns." Konishi performed a cross-linguistic study with Spanish and German speakers to confirm that grammatical gender affected the semantic meaning. These kind of findings are much more reliable in studies that are specifically controlling for this, but my results among my small sample were mixed.
III. Are there echoes of semantic gender around gendered objects and ideas?
To explore this connection between grammatical and semantic gender, I had only one consistent and direct question of all the subjects. I asked if they could think of any non-human objects or abstract ideas that are talked about in gendered ways beyond their grammatical gender. Sometimes I gave prompting examples, like der Tod [death] in German that is often figured (cross-linguistically) as a looming masculine figure and the way that boats and cars are described with feminine language and personality traits in English. It is difficult to think of examples like that on the spot without any context, but we discussed several words that fit the description. These anecdotal connections are not stable enough for me to be able to relate grammatical and semantic gender in any concrete way. Derek, a straight cisgender research assistant, noticed how he made assumptions about the gender of animals, based on the grammatical gender of their name; he said, "Like if you compare der Hund [dog] and die Katze [cat], to be honest, Hund seems a little more masculine in my head; it's a 'him' and a cat is a 'she.'" However, he noted that he could not really think of any examples of non-animal nouns with any kind of gendered connotation. Interestingly, the gender of sun and moon- die Sonne and der Mond-are flipped from the romance languages [French: le soleil/la lune, Spanish: el sol/la luna, Italian: il Sole/la luna] and I was curious if the accompanying semantic resonances were also flipped. Johanna, a genderqueer PhD student, said, "the sun is seen as feminine in German, not just grammatically, but also often described as warming and nurturing." Elsa offered the most connections between grammatical and semantic gender:

I always like Hoffnung [hope], which is female. And Gesellschaft [society] is also female. Demokratie [democracy] is also female. So I actually think there are probably also horrific social concepts with a female gender, but generally I think if you look at the whole "Mother Earth" archetype, then to me, that makes total sense, to have those concepts connected with a female pronoun, rather than der Tod [death] or der Stadt [city].

Elsa is performing something of a feminist reappropriation of the traditionally male-dominated language. Often when connections between grammatical and semantic gender are made, the ideologies of male superiority and misogyny prevail. For example, Bassetti describes how masculine object nouns are rated higher for potency and how grammatically feminine personality traits like "courage" are rated lower for extroversion. The words that Elsa lists are most likely feminine for morphological reasons: the endings -schaft [like Freundschaft (friendship) and Wirtschaft (economy)], - ung [like Beziehung (relationship) and Gründung (foundation)], and - kratie [like Aristokratie (aristocracy)] are all always feminine. Nevertheless, she associates them with the semantically feminine and personally attaches herself to ideals that she believes in, via the feminine marker. Bassetti writes how "adults make sense a posteriori of the gender assignments of their mother tongue, for instance explaining that the word 'beard' is feminine, in spite of its male connotations, because it is soft and pliable." She is connecting all of these positively valued words under the umbrella of the stereotypically feminine imagery of "Mother Earth."

Yet Bertha dismissed this connection, crediting instead the effects of culture and gender stereotypes: "if a flower, die Blume, is tinted more female, that is because I have more associations of flowers and women and female-looking and red and pink and conventionally feminine things that are branded feminine through culture and not through language." In this moment, she acknowledges the gendered imagery that is associated with flowers, but denies the importance of the grammatical gender marker in making this connection
IV. How do we include genderqueer and nonbinary people in the discussion?
So far, like much of the work on this topic, we have gotten as far as diagnosing the problem in terms of the linguistic imbalance between men and women, but there are other gendered embodiments (both physical and linguistic) that this paper intends to make visible. In "Androcentrism in Prescriptive Grammar," Ann Bodine writes about the history of the masculine form being used as a neutral third-person marker, as well as the various battles over the issue as social climates around gender shifted to be more inclusive of women in the public sphere. Bodine's article, and many more like it, is important and invaluable to the cause of moving towards inclusive language. However, though she discusses the use of "they" as a singular third-person pronoun for a gender nonspecific referent, she never once mentions its possibility as a pronoun for those who identify outside of male and female. This oversight is understandable, given that the piece was written in 1975, but it is now time to address the cisnormativity in this conversation.
V. How do genderqueer people approach gendered language?
One of the main goals of this research endeavor was to learn how nonbinary and trans Germans use and perhaps modify the grammatically gendered German of their native tongue. I spoke to four people who were not cisgender-Heide, Johanna, Freddi, and Ingrid-and they all used different terms to describe their gender identities-"mostly femme transgender," "a genderqueer trans woman/femme," a simple question mark, and "nonbinary," respectively. In my initial research, I went in search of German terms for queer gender and sexual identities but I mostly only found English loaner words, besides schwul, the equivalent of "gay." I was eager to learn what actual queer Germans used in their daily lives. Surprisingly, I got a different set of words and attitudes from each interviewee. Out of the four genderqueer participants, Ingrid, a PhD student in Computer Science, relied on English words the most, citing widespread English use on the Internet and social media as possible reasons. They confirmed that the terms they use are always "English or very close loan words." Freddi, a journalist, reiterated the common use of English, but also gave the following list:

Okay like, for sexuality: lesbisch, schwul, bisexuell, pansexuell, sapiosexuell, asexuell. I guess there's more, like every week someone invents something new. And then for identity: transfeminin, transmaskulin, Transmann, Transfrau, nichtbinär. Then the rest is all English, like "genderfluid" and "nonbinary." Just your words.

With the exception of schwul, even the words that are in German are very close translations of the English terms. Though it should be noted that most terms for gender and sexuality are just prefixes and suffixes put together, mostly from shared Latin [like sapio-] and Greek [like pan-] roots, so it does make sense for there to be commonalities across languages. Though Freddi refrained from using labels to describe their gender at the moment and gave a noncommittal "Right now? That's a good question" when asked how they would identify their gender, they described a time earlier in their life when finding words for identity used to be more important. When I asked what changed, they said:

I think I got kind of exhausted or bored. There was a point where I had this time of transitioning and I was like, "I want to take hormones and I want to be masculine and be trans male," and I was identifying as that, like four and a half years ago and still all my friends call me "he," but I'm somewhere else now, I think. I don't tell them. Cause it was hard telling them the first time. I explored so much in the transitioning time and I felt so much better and I really enjoy it. I also got very different, like I got very soft actually. I don't know, people were asking me, "why are you wearing a skirt, you never wore a skirt, why are you doing this now?" But I felt like, now this is possible, cause this is drag now. So, yeah. I guess I've always known that this is not the end, and my wish was also not to stay somewhere but to see gender as something that can change throughout your life. And now, the interesting thing is that I don't think about my own gender anymore.

Despite all of this, they maintained that language affects their gender a lot. Because they didn't undergo physical changes in their body or clothing, language was and is the main marker in a shift of identity for them.

And I think I'm part of an academic privileged group who doesn't look so much at bodies. I mean we do, sure, but it's not the first thing. There's a lot about what happens in our heads and how we treat each other. So I've always thought the most important thing is the language. I'm also very picky with that. If someone isn't saying the right pronoun, not just to me, but to others, I'm like [clicks tongue and scoffs]. Cause that can hurt so much, like so much more than anything else. Like people can look at me a certain way where I feel gendered but I'm kind of fine with that. People would understand how I want to get perceived, but still do the language thing as they have it in mind. But it doesn't mean that people don't accept you how you want to be, it's just a different way. And even though I feel very picky with the language, I feel like, pronouns or not, it's fine.

Freddi seems to be contradicting themself some in the above quote, but I see it as holding simultaneous truths about how queer genders are experienced in daily life. Language can simultaneously be the most important battleground and a trifling bump on the road of acceptance.

Heide, a student and volunteer EMT, gave a different list of terms, all that they use or have used to describe herself:

I consider myself a Drittgeschlecht [third gender] and have thought about using for a bit. I prefer "queer" to pervers as it's less insulting and thus less provocative. Back before my operation, I sometimes used the rather vulgar term Schwanzmädchen [girl with a dick] for erotic purposes. Today I usually use "transgender" in lieu of a better word since transgeschlechtlich [transsexual] or transident [trans identity] would likely be misleading.

I think identity is quite important as it allows one to become the change they wish to see in the world without sacrificing the strengths and idiosyncrasies of the platform that is the body. Being a transsexual, probably neuro-divergent, trans femme shapes nearly all my life and touches even low-level stuff like food, sport, sex, etc. It has become a directive for social interaction, too, as gender seems very important to lots of people and failure to perform femininity properly normally either leads to anger or interest. Sometimes talking to friends who are close enough to let me forget gender (because everyone is unique) is incredibly relaxing.

Johanna told me about the difficulty of finding a comfortable space between/outside of male/female though they often resort to the less dysphoric option of female, when they bump against the confines of binary gender. When asked what being a "genderqueer trans woman" means to her, she said,

It means that people incorrectly and forcibly assigned a male gender to me at birth that I don't identify with. I'm genderqueer because I don't believe that gender is/should be an important category at all. At the same time, I've found incredible support and a strong sense of belonging in women's communities. I think femininity is amazing and suits me well. I tell people I'm genderqueer, but it's hard. People support me being trans but it will still mean that they mostly put me into this "woman" box now, which is very often quite comfortable but sometimes feels kind of fraudulent or "I don't completely belong here either."

If there were established ways to speak about nonbinary identities, I think I'd use a nonbinary pronoun. But because of the limits I just use sie, which solves the problem of dysphoria due to not being addressed like a man but still doesn't paint the whole picture.

Ingrid was the fourth genderqueer participant in this project; they are nonbinary and added that they do not wish to physically transition. Given this fact, they describe themself as cis-passing and acknowledge that they "are and probably will always be completely invisible and never fully out." They seemed to struggle the most with the confines of the German language, as a nonbinary native speaker. On the demographic survey, they specified that they use "they" pronouns in English, but that no pronouns should be used for them in German. When asked, "If you do not identify as a man or a woman, how do you address that in German?" they answered simply: "I can't."

Usually I try to not use pronouns for myself or I refer to myself in generic masculine form (but never as a man). In online conversations, I'm usually pretty open about it and happy to explain to friends. In the real world, I'm mostly closeted.

But having found out my gender has brought me some kind of peace of mind, knowing that I'm not super weird for not getting along with the label "woman." I'm most afraid of people having wrong expectations on me based on how they read me as female, especially in professional contexts. The better someone knows me, the more I'm okay with them calling me a woman, because I know they know the real me. If the world had less strict gender categories and stereotypes, I probably would even identify as a woman.

Ingrid describes feeling contained by gender stereotypes and strict gendered language, rather than taking issue necessarily with the gender they were assigned at birth. In a world with less rigid options, they can imagine feeling comfortable in that gender marker. For now, they take refuge in the English language, but there must be a way to be German and queer, even as Ingrid describes becoming "more aware of implicit gender biases in the German language since [they] found out about [their] genderqueerness." But the language-even if partially borrowed from English-does exist and is a vital part of gender exploration. Heide said:

One of the key elements to understanding my condition was learning the term "Shemale" from a disreputable site. Since then, I have struggled intensely to understand, analyze and describe the intersections of gender, society, the brain and similar topics. Without a clear language, most of this wouldn't have been possible and I doubt that I would have even succeeded in getting hormones to treat my depression and temporary suicidality.
VI. How do we open up the possibilities of gender variance in language?
People like Heide need to be represented in language, first as a role model for possibility, then as a tool for self-realization. And as liberating as it can be to "make up" words, a crucial aspect of self-realization is to have the capacity to be understood and validated-perhaps not by everyone, but by a significant group. Gregor, a heteroflexible cisgender physiotherapist confirms that he is not able to access gender-neutrality when speaking German or French, and thus reverts to English: "When I try to avoid gendered nouns, English is very easy to use." Though this is difficult to prove, perhaps a lack of linguistic representation forecloses possible gender variance and a more open exploration of gender. The aphorism "you can't be what you can't see" (or in this case "can't read or hear") seems to apply. There continue to be people who do explore expansive gender options, but it is impossible to know just how many people-who might otherwise move beyond the limiting "male" and "female"-do not even have the capacity to imagine such a thing as possible without a vocabulary to express and explore it. The scope of this paper leaves these questions in the realm of speculation, but future studies should investigate this more concretely.
VII. Must language be gendered at all?
The mere existence of "natural gender" and genderless languages proves that grammatical gender is not necessary for a language to function. Turkish is one of these grammatically genderless languages, and due to the prevalence of Turkish immigrants in Berlin, several of my subjects spoke (at least some) Turkish-whether through time spent abroad in Turkey or work with Turkish-speaking refugees. Freddi described Turkish as easier than the other languages they had learned in terms of grammar:

You put the pronoun at the end of the word. So if you say "I'm going," you say "gidiyorum" and "um" means me, and if you say "he's going" you just say "gidiyor." If you say "she's going," it's "gidiyor"-he and she are the same. So you can speak a really long time and you don't know the gender the person has.

It is possible to fault the language for this, crediting this simplicity with a lack of semantic clarity, but what if we took the opposite view? Perhaps knowing that you are speaking or hearing about a human is all the clarity you need in the general cases. Men and women still exist in Turkey, and I am sure that nonbinary people do as well, though I do not know of any personally, yet the language does not require the specificity of "he" and "she." This speculation is far beyond the scope of this paper, but perhaps grammatically genderless languages-and to a lesser extent, "natural gender" languages-provide more space for gender exploration.

However "natural gender" languages like English still require humans to be categorized linguistically into male and female for personal pronouns and the occasional gendered group or professional term, like "ladies and gentlemen" or "fireman." The growing acceptance of "they" as a singular pronoun helps blur these lines, but so far nonbinary and genderqueer people have been the main advocates for its use. While some people-especially those familiar with the movement for inclusive language-use "they" and gender-neutral language as a default, this is not quite mainstream practice yet. There is no way to accurately assess a stranger's gender, so the best practice is to work neutrality into initial interactions. A great example of this is referring to strangers as "that person over there" in lieu of "that boy/man" or "girl/woman" and to incorporate singular "they" into your vocabulary, as in "someone left their coat here." The latter is already often used in mainstream speech, though grammar purists still deny the grammatical validity of singular "they." In English, these are big steps forward in combating cisnormativity, but the question is how to take these motivations into the confines of the grammatically gendered language that does not provide the refuge of a non-gendered third-person pronoun like "they"-however controversial "they" can sometimes still be.
VIII. What's next?
Without changing every part of the language, how might it be possible to further separate semantic and grammatical gender into a space of neutrality? I see a middle ground that I have begun to discuss above, that I shall call "degendering the stranger." When asked if gender-neutral language was possible in German, or in any language, Johanna said,

Gender-neutral to me means that a person's gender-or someone's reading thereof-is not conveyed and not relevant when talking about completely different topics. It's quite possible to talk about a "person" instead of a man or a woman, and about a "kid" or "child" instead of a boy or a girl.

It does not make sense to do with away with grammatical and semantic gender entirely, at least for as long as gender itself is a relevant form of human categorization. There is a difference between self-chosen language and the assumptions we (necessarily) make about strangers in every moment, which are shown most concretely in the pronouns we impose onto strangers. The only concrete action towards a separation of semantic and grammatical gender in which I feel confident is to commit to this work of "degendering the stranger." In English, I have given examples and suggestions for this above. In German and similarly gendered languages, I do not know the best, most economical, yet inclusive way to do this. Instead of imposing an outside suggestion, I have instead attempted to merely call attention to a significant problem and give space to the voices directly affected. Though I do not have a suggestion for the precise language to be used, I feel confident that the societal shift will happen alongside the new accepted language. Axel, a self-described "boring straight male" IT freelancer said:

Yeah, but I think it's also a matter of getting used to things, because every time you change in any way, your immediate instinct is to say like, "no we never needed that," and like "come on, is it really important?" And then you get used to it, like with "they." The first time I read "they," I was like, "come on, this is bullshit" and now I'm really annoyed if someone doesn't use it, so I think it would be kind of weird to introduce it at first, but probably once everyone would be used to it, it would probably be fine and everyone knows what. It would weird me out a bit at first, definitely.

The difficult part will definitely be finding language that can be accepted into the mainstream. English speakers lucked out with "they," but users of neo-pronouns like "xe" and "hir" can attest to the fact that it is much more difficult to gain acceptance for entirely newly crafted language.
IX. Questions for further research
Why is the neutral form das so desexed in German? It would be considered dehumanizing and rude to use the neutral set of articles and pronouns, like the English "it," in regards to a human. (Unless of course, you're referring to the abstract human category of das Mädchen [girl] which uses the es [it] pronoun.) The argument that neutral is the domain of objects does not make sense in a grammatically gendered language where a spoon is masculine [ der Löffel] and a newspaper is feminine [ die Zeitung], for example. I am not suggesting that mainstream language reform should necessarily move in the direction of using es for humans-particularly for already-often dehumanized transgender and genderqueer humans. I am merely pointing out one of the cracks in the logic of grammatical gender.

Hopefully this paper will show the need to bring attention to the issue of the exclusivity of gendered language, not just in the imbalance between men and women, but also of genderqueer and nonbinary people. Further research and study in this area is certainly warranted. I will do my part to continue with these lines of thought, but I also recognize the importance of speaking for oneself and advocate that German speakers who are directly affected guide the conversation on how best to work with the language, and with society itself. For example, in my research I learned about the group Dritte Option that advocates for a legal third gender marker. Language reform plays an important role in affecting our societal understanding of gender, but so too do societal shifts affect the language we use.
***
There are many terms available for those who blur the binary of male and female. For purposes of clarity and ease of reading, I will mostly use nonbinary and genderqueer. However, when I am describing the subjects I spoke to, I will use the terms that they provided in the demographic survey each participant filled out. For the purposes of this paper, nonbinary is used for genders that do not fall into the strict binary categories of male and female. Similarly, I will use genderqueer slightly more broadly to talk about people whose gender is queer in some way, whether that means neither male nor female, both male and female, or some combination of the two.
I am borrowing the terms "grammatical" and "semantic" from Prewitt-Freilino et. al, Bassetti, and others. I understand the distinction as such: grammatical refers to the linguistic categorization where all nouns are assigned a feminine or masculine (and sometimes neuter, like in German) gender. Grammatical gender languages include German, French, Spanish, and Hebrew. The other possible categories are natural gender languages like English, where gendered pronouns are used to refer to humans and sometimes gendered animals, but not to objects and abstract ideas. The last option is genderless languages like Finnish and Turkish, which do not even distinguish between "he" and "she." I use semantic to refer to the social meaning of gender, the masculine/male and feminine/female attributes of people.
All interviews were conducted in Berlin, Germany in July 2017. The names of the subjects have been changed to protect confidentiality.
Cisgender refers to people whose gender identity and gendered expression aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth, as opposed to transgender or nonbinary people, for example. A favorite of mine is that the words for "feminism" in German and French are ironically masculine: "der Feminismus" and "le féminisme," respectively.
Benedetta A. L. Bassetti, "Is grammatical gender considered arbitrary or semantically motivated? Evidence from young adult monolinguals, second language learners, and early bilinguals," British Journal of Psychology 105, no. 2 (2014): 274.
Ibid., 275.
Toshi Konishi, "The Semantics of Grammatical Gender: A Cross-Cultural Study," Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 22, no. 5 (1993): 519.
Bassetti, 275.
Ibid.
Ann Bodine, "Androcentrism in prescriptive grammar: singular 'they', sex-indefinite 'he', and 'he or she,'" Language in Society 4 (1975): 129-146.
Cisnormativity is an ideology that assumes all people are cisgender or that cisgender people are the norm. For example, only having "male" and "female" boxes on forms or the "boys" and "girls" sections of the clothing store.
Heide uses both "they" and "she" pronouns. Though perhaps visually jarring, I will use both sets of pronouns when referring to her.
Urning is a term for a third gender, coined by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who in turn appropriated the term from Plato's Symposium.
[ See note 13] Johanna also uses both "she" and "they" pronouns in English, though they list sie [she] as their German pronoun.
Heteroflexible refers to a sexual orientation that allows for minimal queerness/homosexuality for people who might otherwise identify as heterosexual; to be brief, heteroflexible means "mostly straight."
Anecdotally, I noticed that these (self-selected) participants seemed much more cognizant of these issues and willing to use singular "they" as the default when speaking English. Carl shared this:

You can use singular "they" as a third person pronoun and the first time I saw this, I was like, "what?" But then apparently Shakespeare used it already, and now I always get upset if you write "themself" with an "f" and Google spelling correction tells you that's wrong, it's like "noooo, it's Shakespeare!" For me, it's almost automatic by now.
Romaine opens her article with an epigraph from Mark Twain's The Awful German Language, which plays on this bizarre fact of German in the following exchange:

Gretchen: Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?

Wilhelm: It has gone to the opera.
Dritte-option.de

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Exploring Genderqueer Identity Within Gendered German

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by Léah Miller I. Introduction Within a grammatically gendered language like German, it is difficult to make space for those who fall outside of or in between male and female, masculine and feminine. Although feminists have long been battling over male-dominant language (see Bodine, Sato et. al, and Sarrasin et.

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I wanted to try to easy reading, so looked around the internet for some accessible childrens books, so the german would hopefully be easy. I wanted to find some new words either verbs or different ways to use those verbs in past and future tense. I found this collection of childrens books called 'Dr. Brumm'. On this website it shows several pictures from inside each book, so i used these to have a look for any words or grammar i may have came across in class to help me better understand. I read through them and for every word or little thing I didnt understand, i tried to search online for an explanation/translation.  I found this really helped, and i could do it slowly in my own time so i could absorb the information properly. Overall, this method was really useful and I learnt quite a lot.

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Webseite und Blog des Autors Daniel Napp. Alles über Dr. Brumm und seine Freunde.

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I found this video really interesting. Although its just some light-hearted fun, I really enjoyed watching this as it connects my love for the korean language with german in the exact same place where I used to visit everyday when i lived in korea. I loved to listen to the guy talking german whilst reading both the english and korean subtitles, to see what he was saying in english, and then connecting the german with korean too, to remember it. I managed to pick up a few words despite how quickly he was talking, and i learnt some new phrases just by watching this video. Overall although its a fun, silly video, i really did learn some new small things and enjoy it at the same time too. He used some very useful phrases such as asking for directions etc which can be really useful for real-life situations, and I noticed he used some expressions in German like 'excuse me' and 'have a nice day' which are always good to remember. After this, i then browsed around youtube looking for similar videos to this one, and searched online some of the expressions he used, in english, so i could then find them in german. I kept a note of these and revised them and tested myself to make sure i remember them.

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🇩🇪 talking to koreans in german (ft. mario adrion), JAYKEEOUT x VWVB™

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english to korean to german translation, useful

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english to korean to german translation, useful

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Because I used to study Korean as my degree, i have a lot of experience using the korean language. I find i often struggle with German as it is so different to the language i was so used to learning. I have had to learn a totally new approach to learning german as ive realised it really cannot be learn in the same way, personally. I find it difficult to memorise german words and spelling, so i came up with the idea of when i try to revise or learn some new words outside of class at random, that i put the english, then korean, and then find the german. this way, it is connecting to two languages in my head so i have something to grab onto in my head and assosiate it with something when i try to remember it. I instantly thought this really has worked and has made learning German much more enjoyable already despite how behind i am. Now I have been able to better learn vocabulary and attach it to another language i feel very comfortable in and familiar with. Im really happy I have found this method and it really has changed the learning process for german for me already.

I looked around online for any random, useful phrases or words that i feel can be useful to know on this course, or potentially prepare me for any other chapters with new vocabulary that we might learn. this was mostly to build my confidence too, as i have struggled with vocabulary since i began late and wanted to broaden my knowledge a bit more just incase we may come across any of these basic words. I later tried to find if the singular nouns were die, der, or das and double checked to the best of my ability with dict.cc.

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After realising that I learn best visually with audio, i realised maybe Youtube is the best way for me to do additional exercises or to help me feel a bit more secure in German, so I don't feel so behind in class. While I was tidying my room and doing other chores, I found this video and put it on loudly on my TV while i did other things. I found that it was quite long and quite difficult, but i kept it on even just to familiarise myself with the sound of German. I struggle to know how to pronounce some things, so hearing someone else speak absolutely anything in German despite how difficult i found this, really helped me get a feel for how the language sounds. Upon reflection i realise this may have been a bit too much of a 'trying to run before i can walk' approach, so after about 40 minutes I decided I should look elsewhere for something a little less overwhelming. But hearing the sound of german for a long extent of time whilst doing other things really helped ease me into the sound of the language. I hope this kind of approach can help me more in the future with my listening, as I struggle to understand when others speak german around me or to me.

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Learn German For Beginners 🇩🇪 The Complete Course (Level A.1) | Get Germanized

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I used youtube to try a different approach to learning german numbers. I realised that just writing them down and trying to memorise them with writing and reading wasnt enough. I kept getting them mixed up as I do also with my own native numbers, so I thought maybe seeing them change visually infront of me with a song can help. Although this video is not up to 30 minutes long, i spent around 35 mins going through this video, testing myself and then checking, and then finally going through the video again to make sure I felt confident. I realised the melody with the numbers helped me remember them much better, and with the numbers having little faces on them, i can pull back to that in my memory and visual each one with the spelling underneath. I am a very visual learner with languages and I need to connect new information to an image or something that catches my eye. I realised this method definitely worked as there are so many numbers to remember too.

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♫ GERMAN Numbers 1-100 ♫ Big Numbers Song ♫ Deutsche Zahlen von 1 bis 100 ♫ Zahlenlied ♫