Learners Difficulties with Grammatical Gender in German as a Foreign Language

In the acquisition of German as a foreign language, grammatical gender has often been viewed as a problem by both learners and teachers alike. The aim of this paper is to suggest some reasons why this is so, focusing on problems of production rather than reception. The intention is not to establish a set of rules which might be pedagogically useful in the assignment of gender to German nouns, but rather to put the problem of grammatical gender in German in a wider linguistic and psycholinguistic context than has previously been attempted in the pedagogical literature.