Nouns and Articles

Gender of Nouns

Nouns are people, places, things, and ideas. In German, nouns are ALWAYS capitalized.

All singular German nouns have one of three genders, indicated by the article that precedes it: the article der for masculine nouns, die for feminine, or das for neuter (If you're familiar with Spanish, it's just like the masculine 'el' and feminine 'la.').

Certain nouns always have a gender that you'd expect- for example, 'the man' is translated into 'der Mann,' using the masculine article.

Unfortunately, most other nouns have seemingly random articles. The only way to really know for sure which gender a noun has is to learn and memorize it.

There are a few tricks for certain nouns to recognize which gender it has. This was extremely helpful for me, and I recommend for you to memorize as many of these following rules as you can.

Plurals of Nouns

Plurals are a bit tricky. The best way to learn plurals is to learn the plural form when learning the singular form for each noun. A few rules of plurals are listed below.