Nouns
are used to give names to people, objects and things, as well as
abstract ideas and are always written with a capital letter in
German.
Gender
In
German every noun has a grammatical gender. The gender is shown by
the article in front of the noun. The three genders are;
- Neuter
- Feminine
In
general grammatical gender is not
necessarily based on natural gender.
Although there are a few rules which can help predict the gender of a
noun, the following can only ever serve as guidelines; many
exceptions will be found. The safest approach to gender is always to
learn each noun with the appropriate definite article (der, die or
das).
Masculine
- Male persons, male jobs/occupation, male animals
- Days of the week, months, seasons
- Most nouns with the following endings -and/-ant, -ent, -er, -ig, -ismus, -ist, -ling, -or
Neuter
Many nouns with the prefix Ge- at the beginning
- The infinitive forms of verbs acting as nouns
- Young persons and animals
- Point of the compass and vocabulary relating to weather
- Make of car
- Rock and minerals
- Alcoholic drinks (except beer ‘das Bier‘)
- All nouns ending in -chen, -lein
- A lot of nouns ending in -nis, -ment, -o, -t(r)um
Faminine
- Femal persons, femal jobs/occupations adn femal animals
- Many flower and trees
- Motorcycles, ships and aeroplanes
- Numerals uses as nouns
- Nouns derived from measurement or size adjectives
- Most nouns ending in -ei, -enz, -heit, -keit, -ie, -ik, -in, -ion, -schaft -tät, -ung
