Same here, but I don't remember being taught that little rule, but still - "little madame" is still feminine, yes? I mean, come on - if you're going to 'categorize' a blouse as feminine and a shirt as masculine.....it's one of the very few things that didn't make sense in German.

Anyway - I've always had the greatest respect for anyone who wanted (or had to) take on English as a 2nd language. Being a mongrel language, all of the rules have exceptions and the exceptions have exceptions.

>When I learnt German in school about fourty years ago, I learnt that all nouns which end with 'chen' are 'das', and that 'chen' means little. So Mädchen is derived from little madame, where the a is changed into ä for some reason I don't remember anymore.
>
>>Sometimes my husband and I play MMORPG's online as a team, and when someone else joins the team we'll tell them that we're a husband and wife team. Sometimes these other people would try to guess who was the husband and who was the wife, based on our playstyle, character choices, and 'chatstyle'. Almost 3/4's of them would guess incorrectly.
>>
>>But yeah, English is not a 'strongly typed' language as some others - and I'll admit, I'm still trying to figure out why it's "die Frau", but "das Madchen" when it's "der Mann" and "der Junge".
>>
>>
>>>
>>>Hi,
>>>
>>>Somehow germany has strange rules for names. We are limited what and when to use by law (impossible to name a boy Jesus for example). But it's common sense here to give short names or diminutives as given names. A german called Mike normaly is not a Michael.
>>>
>>>Agnes is middlename of mother-in-law. (you now "Die Beste" translate straight to "The Best"). Decade ago family need an alias so we choose this one. e-mail is valid for nosy web sites (the ones not completely mistrust), was valid then, so I simply used this identity. For now it's valid here because I have to set up business from scratch and the is not top priority.
>>>
>>>The problem with the gender gives me a lot of fun - and I put some work on the fact to keep messages neither male nor female. On some dircet questions there was no easy way around, but english is not tricky about gender in language . I imagine this in russian or even better in japanese language.
>>>
>>>I'm here but limited, the Fox will go out of my focus soon. I'm looking around for something new to set up the old projects. Not realy shure what to use except to move away from Redmont.
>>>
>>>Lutz