Nouns: genders and plurals

For English speakers learning German, one of the most striking differences between the languages is the way German nouns and other words used with nouns have endings and other changes to show gender, number and case. These inflections seem difficult at first, but they are central to the way German works as a language. An important stage in learning German is realizing the system which underlies them and the role they play in showing how sentences fit together. It is vital, first, to know the gender of any nouns you need to use and how they form their plurals in order to be able to express yourself properly and understand written and spoken German easily. In fact, gender and plural formation in German is not as varied and unsystematic as would appear from many books, and in this section we show you how you can master it more easily.

It is easy to think that every German noun has an arbitrary gender and an arbitrary way of forming the plural, and that both of these must be learnt separately for every noun in the language. The meaning of a noun, aside from the tendency for names of male beings to be masculine and those of female beings to be feminine, rarely gives any indication of gender. In practice, though, there are many helpful regularities.