A Foundation Course in Reading German, 2017a

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12/8/2017
For example, in the nominative case (used when nouns are sentence subjects), the
articles are:
Masculine:
Feminine:
Neuter:
der Tisch (the table)
die Feder (the feather, quill pen)
das Bett (the bed)
It is recommended that, as you learn the nouns you choose to memorize, you learn
each noun with its definite article, because there are only a few cases when you
can determine what the gender is by simply looking at the noun. Some of these
exceptions are:
a) Nouns that end in –chen or –lein are neuter. These suffixes denote
diminutives, e.g. das Städtchen (little town).
b) Humans and animals that are obviously male or female usually have the
equivalent gender. For example,
der Mann (the man
der Bulle (the bull)
der Vater (the father)
die Frau (the woman)
die Kuh (the cow)
die Mutter (the mother)
c) All nouns that end in –ei, –heit, –ie, –in, –keit, –schaft, –tät, –ung are
feminine. For example:
die Bäckerei (bakery)
die Tragödie (tragedy)
die Gesundheit (health)
die Lehrerin (woman teacher)
die Freundlichkeit (friendliness)
die Landschaft (landscape)
die Zeitung (the newspaper)
die Universität (university)
Unit: 1: Basics
4. Noun Plurals
The most important thing to learn about German noun plurals is that, unlike in
English, how a noun is spelled is neither an easy nor a reliable way to tell whether it