Gender trouble

Part of the motivation for reading a novel in German, incidentally, it the creeping realisation that my hold on the language is slipping. I mean, I'm still conversational in it and--barring unforeseen tragedy--probably always will be. But some of the more arbitrary bits have been bedeviling me late, chief among them noun gender. Languages are full of patterns, but there are always certain aspects which can only be mastered by brute force memorisation and gobs of reinforcement. And since I've neglected reinforcement, I'm having to resort to force again.

Usually I have the most difficult distinguishing masculines and neuters, because morphologically they're quite similar. (They often form their plurals in the same ways, for instance.) But recently I'm stumbling more over the "stealth feminines", those words with feminine gender that lack one of the characteristic endings such as -ung, -heit, or -e. Angst, for instance, or Gefahr. In fact, I'm considering making my own list for self-study. (Doubtless something like this already exists, but in cases like this the process is often as important as the result.)

Foreign borrowings in particular are a minefield. So it was comforting to come across this excellent website and see that even the Germans themselves can't agree whether it should be das Cola or die Cola (although bizarrely they seem to have settled on das Sofa but die Couch). And that's before we even entertain the question of regional usages. (The Swabians, for instance, insist on dr Sofa, because that's the gender it has in French, whereas for their part the Badener prefer to call it a Chaiselongue.)