[badesalz]

About the nonsensical assignment of gender to nouns I agree in principle but just a quick tip for the particular example in the footnote: “Mädchen” ends in -chen which is the diminutive form of a word (originally “die Magd” for a young woman). All words ending in -chen are neutral. Similarly, “das Bübchen” could refer to a young boy and is also neutral.

Hope this helps and good luck with learning German. If it wasn’t my native language I wouldn’t want to learn it but I do love it.

[black-tea]

It doesn't make sense, but it is a pattern. There is a similar pattern in French: all nouns ending in -tion or -sion are feminine (apart from a single exception: le bastion). Handily we also have most of those nouns in English too.

When learning French I stopped searching for patterns in genders. Some are truly weird, like penis being feminine and vagina being masculine. But I told myself it's no different to having to remember the pronunciation of every single English word, so my brain easily has capacity for it. After a while it becomes just as natural.

[aasasd]

> All words ending in -chen are neutral. Similarly, “das Bübchen” could refer to a young boy and is also neutral.

Now this actually makes no sense.

[contradictioned]

As someone else commented,

> Diminutive words are always neutral

And there is "die Magd", ancient expression for a young woman and the grammatical gender is female, as well as "der Bube", ancient expression (it is still used more often, though) for a young man and grammatical gender is male.

Of both these words you can create the diminished versions "Bübchen" and "Mädchen" which both follow the aforementioned rule and are neutral.

Commonly, in Germany we say "Jungen und Mädchen" if we refer to children; but which words are chosen to be used are rarely a sensible decision.

[aasasd]

My objection is not to the formulation of the rule, but to the existence of the rule―because where I'm from, a little girl is still a girl, grammatically too.

(Even though I agree in general that little kids make crappy men and women.)

[contradictioned]

Ah, then maybe to clarify further: This rule applies to virtually every word. A table is "der Tisch" (male), a small table is "das Tischchen" (neutral); a tree is "der Baum" (male), a small tree is "das Bäumchen" (neutral); a break is "die Pause" (female), a small break "das Päuschen" (neutral), etc. In theory you can take every word and diminish it by appending "-chen".

You could still argue, that the "-chen"-rule should be overwritten by an "obvious-grammatical-gender"-rule.

[aasasd]

My complaint still stands, but OTOH I just realized I now have a way to turn German into English at least in one aspect.