This paper is a study of a method for teaching German gender and plural assignment developed by the late Donald Steinmetz. My primary source for classroom material was the unpublished handbook for students that Steinmetz co-authored with Donald Nelson, The Joy of Gender: A Student Handbook made available to me by his son, Erik Steinmetz. In the spring semester of 2012, I taught two sections of First Semester German back-to-back in the early afternoon at Central Michigan University which offered me a unique opportunity to test the system on one class while using the other as a control group under identical learning conditions. In this article, I present the teaching methodology of the system and the findings of the study. The first section of the article explains the rule system for German gender and plural assignment. The second section outlines how the study was conducted and discusses the handouts used and the quizzes given. The third section discusses the results of the study and the final section lays out some ideas for further research and teaching practice.