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Along the lines of the vocabulary memorization technique, there is another method to help remember noun gender.

Books and teachers all say to always learn the gender of a noun with the noun. When you learn that “chair” is der Stuhl, you always put the “der” in to remember this and to make it seem natural in your mind. But even when you try to do this, some help would be nice.

The basic principle is that you put the noun in a special location in the world based on its gender. If you are learning a language with two genders, you only need two places. And a three-gender language requires three. This place where you put nouns has to be big as it has to be able to contain every noun in the language. And it has to be a place you know well so you know your way around. I recommend using cities. For German, I am using Manhattan for masculine nouns, Brooklyn for feminine nouns, and Chicago for neuter nouns. There are two different ways you can place the noun.

You can incorporate it into a mnemonic phrase. My phrase for der Stern then becomes “Howard Stern is a star in Manhattan”.

Or you can just think of the city where it should belong and put it somewhere you know. For der Stuhl, I think of the chair in my old apartment in Manhattan. For das Restaurant, I picture a particular restaurant in Chicago. For der Stiefel, I picture a fashion model wearing boots walking down the street in Manhattan. For die Küche, I think of my kitchen in Brooklyn.

You can use the notes feature of langalot to add these notes to words. After a while, your brain will skip the intermediate step of trying to picture the model in boots and figuring out which city she is walking in to figure out the gender. It will just jump to knowing that Stiefel is masculine.