[mvindahl]

In my experience, not having German as my first language, you can get pretty far with guesses and rules of thumb as far as the genders are concerned. With experience your guesses will become more educated. You will start to feel the patterns in how the ending of a word maps to the gender of the noun, with some accuracy. You'll memorize some of the most common exceptions. "Impossible" delineations such as "mit das [..]" will feel wrong.

Also, by all means, memorize the delineation tables and the rotes that will help you identify accusative and dative. I still remember those from school and they never cease to be useful.

Oh, and by the way, it turns out that Polish is even worse in terms of grammar .. or maybe my mind is just less pliable these days :)

[p410n3]

I like that I, as a german with "Abitur", still have no idea what Akkusativ, datic and whatnbot meeans.

Everything above 5th grade was reading poems and stuff, which I did great in :)

[allendoerfer]

Well, Abitur from which state? Also helps if you had Latin.

In Germany the value of high school degrees depends hugely on the state in which you visited school.