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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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".
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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Thing is: - for me “den” is associated with plurals Internally, for me, den is no masculine at all. I wonder if it’s a construct of how I learnt German or innate. I wrote once about the “language switch”, applies here to its full extent
End of conversation
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