Why do all German language resources suggest learning nouns with "der, die and das"? Assuming the noun is singular, a noun heard in context with either "die" and "das" can have its gender uniquely inferred. But "der" could be male or female. So why not learn "den, die and das"?
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No, that's absolutely correct, but there are six possible cases (der, die, das, den, dem, des) which are distributed across the different combinations of case, gender and singular/plural. But if we ignore plural, then "die" is *uniquely* feminine, "das" is *uniquely* neuter...
but "der" is *not uniquely* masculine. However, *den" would be *uniquely* masculine, which I'm claiming makes it a better choice to learn. den/die/das can all be in the same case, too. So for singular words there exists a one-to-one mapping between article and gender.
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I'm not seeing why _der_ is not uniquely masculine. It is _in the nominative case_ and nominative case is what should be used for this? Maybe I'm not following, but you have to use nominative when learning/teaching because otherwise it means you need to learn cases before nouns
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Also (had to look this up, my times of solving "Sagen Sie anders" are long gone) den is also used for plurals (in dativ) so it's not uniquely masculine either
End of conversation
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