Jon Pretty

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"?

I was always only talking about singular nouns, but "der" is *uniquely* masculine only if you know about cases and you're in the nominative case, whereas "den" is *uniquely* masculine across all cases, assuming only singularity (which is an easier concept than cases for most).

My problem is that all the teaching seems to strongly associate "der" with masculine words, which means that if you read a feminine word in dative or genitive case, you'll associate it with being masculine, incorrectly.