In my experience, the gender of nouns is the last remembered, first forgotten aspect of vocabulary learning for most students of German. Left to their own devices, many students believe they must memorize the gender of these nouns, a prospect as daunting to them as it was to Mark Twain: Every noun [in German] has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this, one has to have a memory like a memorandum book (192). More than daunting, however, rote memorization is also effective only for creating short-term memory, a process that encourages the quickly-learned-and-quickly-forgotten syndrome we are trying to avoid in foreign language learning. As an alternative to rote learning of gender, Mathilde Steckelberg (1937) and more recently Mark Strong (1976) propose teaching students to assign gender by rules as much as possible, but I find rule application too limited to inspire student confidence. I can remind them again and again that words ending in -heit, -keit, or -ung (but not -ng) are feminine, but each time they receive it as entirely new information, as well they might. These rules are invariably complicated by exceptions, which undermine trust in the rule. Moreover, applying these rules to Pfeffer's Basic (Spoken) German Dictionary for Everyday Usage, Strong finds that only 52.1% of the nouns conform to the rules of gender (76), not a very encouraging success rate. The plural of nouns is far more predictable, but their fewer exceptions are frustrating enough to students.2 And even were there more reliable rules for gender, processing them mentally for each noun would inhibit the student's spontaneity. In order to guarantee greater rule conformity, Ralph Ewton and Richard Teschner propose organizing a textbook around rule-governed vocabulary. However, I would object to any departure from frequency-based vocabulary, especially if it meant returning to Mark Twain's bird in the blacksmith's shop for the sake of gender rule con ormity (188). If students rely only on memorization and rules to learn gender, they may discover at the end of the first year that their command of much ominal vocabulary is really only passive, which nothing short of an Herculean effort can ever render active again. An insufficient command of gen er makes case learning especially difficult. How often have we heard: But I knew it was accusative; I just didn't know that noun was masuline. Even if students become reasonably fluent in German, they typically remain sloppy about gender, which for Germans is not a very attractive hallmark of American speakers of German. What sounds like grammatical ignorance to Germans can often be attributed to a problem with gender. In the following, I want to propose a method for teaching gender on a level beyond memorization and rule application which I find fosters both spontaneity and accuracy in the acquis ion and application of noun gender for learners of German. I proceed on the assumption that students are best served over the long haul if they can hear what he gender of the noun ought to be, just as native speakers do. If students can hear nouns attached to their gender marker, we can aurally bridge the orthographic gap printed in their textbooks between das and Buch. Although Russian is considered a hard language in many respects, gender presents little difficulty, because the gender marker is attached to the end of the noun. Were German nouns written Dasbuch, or better yet, Buchdas, instead of das Buch, and learned as one word, German's grammatical gender would probably be easier to acquire, even for English speakers only used to natural gender. What cannot be achieved in print, I try to accomplish in the classroom in very simple oral exercises by integrally associating nouns with their