There are many fairly androgynous sounding German names that caused me no end of hell in my mock listening exam. For example, thinking that Ute was a 'he' (and she had the voice for it), I answered all the questions with the 'er' (=he) pronoun, rather than 'sie' (=she). This lost me an unfeasily large number of marks for no good reason.
Thus, I give to you, good noders, a list (by no means canonical, but I'll do my best) of awkward german names that are gender-ambiguous or have in the past confused me:
- Achim: male
- Anke: female
- Arnim: male
- Antje: female
- Baerbel: female
- Dagmar: female
- Effi:female
- Elfi: female
- Erna: female
- Gesa: female
- Gitta: female
- Hannes: male
- Hanno: male
- Hartmut: male
- Hedwig: female
- Heike: female
- Heiko: male
- Heli (actually a shortening of Helmut): male
- Ina: female
- Ingo: male
- Kai: male
- Mana: female
- Mehmet: male
- Meta: female
- Per: male
- Silja: female
- Silke: female
- Thea: female
- Udo: male
- Ulf: male
- Ute: female
- Uwe: male
- Waltraud: female
- Wiebke: female
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