Jon Pretty

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.

Usually before you can read almost anything in Hoch Deutsch and understand anything you have been "living" in German and picked up the rules/tips to know if a word is der/die/das

But this exactly shows the problem! A word is not der, die or das, because you can so frequently hear "der" before a "die" word! And you pick it up by listening to the examples. But half of the words you hear prefixed with "der" are not "der words"!

No, a word "is der" if it's masculine. Period. The fact that is has something else in front does not make it different :P

Why? That's only true in one of the four cases. If a word is masculine, it's "der", "den", "des" or "dem". If someone wants to teach that "masculine words are der-words" then I think that's misleading...

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