Hello everyone! I hope your language learning is going well 😃

The topic that I wanted to talk about today are genders of nouns in German. I think that they are one of the hardest parts of learning German language. For each noun you use in a sentence, it is good and a lot of times necessary to know the gender, so we could use the right form of an article with it. That's why when you start learning German vocabulary, every German teacher would tell you to always remember the noun with its article. For example:

you should learn it as book -------- das Buch

instead of just book -------- Buch

But don't let the struggles that you may have in the beginning discourage you, because a lot of speakers that are almost fluent have trouble with finding out what gender some noun is or make a mistake. It will all come to its place with practice. Practice makes perfect!

First of all, in German language there are 3 genders:

1. masculine (der)
2. feminine (die)
3. neutral (das)

The articles, which you can find in (), are the ones that are connected with that gender. I will share more about them in some of the next topics. For now, we will focus on the gender only.

There are some common rules on how to determine the gender of a noun. I will list them here.

1. Nouns that represent something that has gender in nature have that same gender (for people)

Examples:

woman: die Frau

man: der Mann

wife: die Ehefrau

husband: der Ehemann

child: das Kind

baby: das Baby

There is an exception here:

girl: das Mädchen

There are rules that when nouns end with certain suffix, that suffix determines their gender. If you decide to look it up somewhere, you will see a dozen of suffixes for each gender and it is too much to remember all at once. I will just point out some of the most common for the beginners and eventually, while learning you will notice the pattern for other words, or maybe I will share them in some next topic too.

1. Nouns that end with -ant, -ich, -ling are masculine

1. A lot of nouns that end with -er are masculine

Here we use the rule that we mentioned in the beginning, when something is naturally masculine, the noun is also masculine. Most of the nouns that represent what is somebody by career end with -er (der Bäcker - baker, der Baumeister - builder etc.)

1. Nouns that end with -heit, -keit, -ung, -schaft, -a are feminine

1. Most of the nouns that end with -e are feminine

I say the most, because there are exceptions, like when the noun is clearly representing something that is masculine in nature (der Junge - boy) or some other words that you will learn along the way (like das Auge - eye).

1. Nouns that end with -chen, -um, -lein are neutral

There is also one more trick for determining the gender. Sometimes, the whole group of words has same gender. I will list some of them below.

1. months, days, seasons - masculine

der Januar, der Sonntag, der Winter,...

1. colors - neutral

das Blau, das Rot,...

I tried to write some general rules, if you remember something else that you think would be useful for other people that are learning German please feel free to share in the comments!