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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Because the rote learning for German is that a word is _der_ if it has der in the nominative case, aka it is masculine. It doesn't _really_ matter what it has in front (and was told to do so). And as soon as you learn cases, you can backtrack and figure out the gender of any word
Ok, so associating "der" with "masculine" works for rote learning. That's my problem. No native speaker learns like that. Native speakers learn by hearing their parents saying short phrases and they copy them. And I guess they hear "der Fisch" more than they hear "die Fisch".
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If I hear "den Tisch" (and I know it's singular) I know immediately that "Tisch" is a masculine word, and that's a datapoint I can refer back to. If I hear "der Schule" I only know that it's not neuter, unless I have more context.
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So I'm saying that "den" is a much better word for indicating gender than "der" because you can infer the gender context-free, as long as you know the word is singular.
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Native learners don’t really have to memorize words in any language. Fascinatingly (well, to me) there are rules that govern what gender a word should be. They’re necessary to make new words. Doubt anyone knows them outside of linguistic departments.
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I think they're taught quite widely in German, and I've learned a few... But does the same apply in Russian?
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