The nouns (Substantive) get their articles ,three forms : DER maskulin Die feminin Das neutral The masucline article (der) and their nouns are more inclined to refer to masculine nouns like ( Junge , Mann , Sohn ,Vatter etc),but it is not a rule since many words got the article (der) where they are abstract nouns ,neither feminine nor masculine ( der Ruf ) and many objects do also get the (der) article while there is no indication of their gender such as ( der Stift , der Stuhl , etc). The feminine article ( die) is more associated with feminine nouns like ( die Frau , Tochter , Blume ,etc) but again there is no rule that you can follow for all words since there is here an exception too for ( das Maedchen , das Frauelein ) , both feminine words yet taking the neutral article (das) ,also many abstract words take the die article , such as ( die Reise ) . The neutral article ( das) would be used with words neither feminine nor masculine ,where the gender is not determined , a good example is the word ( das Kind) , child is neither girl nor boy , but again you can't rely much on this as a rule . It's not the actual person, place or thing that has gender in German, but the WORD that stands for the actual thing. Yet again there are some rules ,where words ending in certain nouns suffixes will take a certain article as for example : - All nouns ending in ( heit , in) will take the article (die) --- Lehrerin , Dummheit - All nouns ending in (chen , lein) will take the article (das) --- Maedchen , Frauelein All plural nouns take the article (die). For more detailed explanation of the german genders and articles you can check this site : http://german.about.com/library/weekly/aa042098.htm

There is very little obvious about the genders. There are a number of rules, most of which have a number of exceptions. I initially learned to recognise the genders from a book called "A Complete German Course". If you ever find it, buy it, even if only for the lesson on genders. It helped me tremendoulsy.