Jon Pretty

I just feel that when you start learning German you learn these associations: der = masc., die = fem., das = neut. and then you see "der Schule" for the first time, so you'd assume it's masculine. If you learned "den = masculine" instead then you might be confused but not wrong.

Technically you should just learn word gender, but easiest is pairing with the definite. And then the problem is being in non-nominative case, which _may_ confuse... but in the end there should be no confusion: Der Schüle is just in another case, because Schüle is a f. word

That's understood, but why make it harder for the student by choosing a case without a one-to-one mapping between articles and genders?

My German is a bit oldie (haven't spoken or written almost any in 11 years) but gender != plural, the mapping is 1-1: a word is eithre masculine, feminine or neutral (and each can be plural as well)

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.

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

I'm not sure you do need to learn nominative first. Almost any interesting sentence needs an accusative or dative noun. Is it any worse if you say "Den Mann isst den Fisch" than "Der Mann isst der Fisch"?