Nouns, pronouns and articles
Nouns
The rules for nouns concerning gender and plurals are explained here.
Gender
All nouns in German, as in English, fall into three groups, or genders - masculine, feminine and neuter. In English the vast majority of nouns, the ones that refer to things, are neuter, such as 'arm', 'hand', 'leg' and so on. Normally, only nouns referring to people are masculine or feminine, such as 'man', 'woman', 'mother', 'father' etc. An odd exception still exists when people refer to a 'ship', or perhaps a 'car', as 'she'.
In German, things are different. Nouns referring to things can be any one of the three genders. For example, the word for 'arm', 'hand' and 'leg' each belongs to a different gender in German.
| arm | der Arm (m) |
| hand | die Hand (f) |
| leg | das Bein (n) |
Points to note
All nouns in German always start with a capital letter.
The word for 'the' in German - 'der', 'die', 'das' - varies according to the gender of the noun. Unfortunately, there is no logic to explain which noun will have which gender in German. The only solution is, each time you learn a new noun, to learn the word for 'the' at the same time, so that you learn 'die Katze', for example, rather than just 'Katze' on its own.
A third, reassuring, thing to note from two of the three nouns above is that many words in English and German are similar. For example, the verb to 'drink', and the past tenses 'drank'/'drunk' are almost exactly the same in German: 'trinken', 'trank', 'getrunken'.
Plurals
German is again very different from English in that there are different ways of forming the plural of nouns. Rather than trying to memorise rules for how different groups of nouns form their plural in different ways, not forgetting the odd exception, it is better to follow the advice given on gender, above, and learn the plural form for each new noun that you learn.