As someone who speaks German alright (lived there awhile and studied a few years in school) gendered nouns and all of the versions of “the” are just stupidly laborious and I never cared if I got it wrong. Even if my accent was okay (it wasn’t okay, my US German teacher was Danish and I was sometimes told I sounded Danish) my lack of fucks about der, die, das, dem etc made it very obvious I wasn’t a native speaker.
All of that said, I found that popup kids book pretty easy to read.
my lack of fucks about der, die, das, dem etc made it very obvious I wasn’t a native speaker.
I employ many non native speakers and most of them struggle with their articles and are very self conscious about them. They often consider themselves bad speakers because of this and I fear they sometimes talk less because they don’t have the courage to make grammar mistakes.
I always tell them that I don’t give a fuck about articles. Most of the time they don’t convey any meaning. You can skip them or use a generic “de” to fake any article. For me as an employer it’s more important that you practice talking, get a good vocabulary and have your times (especially Präsens, Perfekt, Futur) straight.🤷
