A Foundation Course in Reading German, 2017a

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12/8/2017
is singular or plural. Instead you will need to rely on other reading cues introduced
over the first four units of this textbook.
In English, noun plurals are generally formed by adding –s or –es, but there are
some exceptions such as men, geese, oxen, children, fish, and deer where
respectively we have: changed a stem vowel; added –en; added -ren; or – as in
the last two examples – where we have made no change at all. Whereas in German,
very few nouns form their plurals with an –s. Those that do are usually borrowed
foreign words such as Hotel, Auto, Restaurant; these have plural forms ending with
–s: zwei Hotels.
German nouns use a very wide range of plural forms, much wider than the range of
the English "exceptions" given above. And what’s more fundamentally disturbing to
our English habit of relying on noun spellings is the fact that German nouns change
their spelling for more reasons than just their singular or plural status. (You’ll learn
about other reasons for noun spelling changes in upcoming units). So the bottom
line for readers of German is that you cannot simply rely on a noun’s spelling.
Instead you must learn to pay attention to the context of the noun, for example the
particular form of the noun’s article, whether a verb is conjugated for a singular or
plural subject, etc. By Unit 4 of this course you will have learned all the possible
clues you can look for to determine whether a noun is singular or plural. You will
also discover that it is faster and easier to "read" the surrounding articles and word
endings that modify a noun (since there are only a handful of articles and endings
to learn) than it is to consult your dictionary for every single noun to check what the
noun’s spelling might be telling you. Use your dictionary for this purpose only as a
last resort, because that is the source most likely to mislead you.
However, it is important to gradually become familiar with the types of German
spelling changes that happen to plural nouns so that you can look up nouns in your
dictionary, where nouns are listed only under their singular spelling. German-
English dictionaries conventionally display two spelling variants or endings for every
noun: the first is typically the genitive-case spelling (more about that in Unit 2), and
the second is the plural spelling. Consult your dictionary to check its formatting
conventions.
Compare:
der Mann (man)
die Frau (woman)
das Ergebnis (result)
die Männer (men)
die Frauen (women)
die Ergebnisse (results)