| Language notes | | der, die, das |
| | der Betrieb - the company
die Chefin- the (woman) boss
das Problem - the problem
die Fragen - the questions
Nouns in German are classified as being either masculine, feminine or neuter. This is called 'gender'. This convenient grammatical label applies to people as well as things.
Since it's not always predictable which gender a noun is, it has to be learnt each time. The gender also affects the articles that precede the nouns:
der (masculine), die (feminine), das (neuter)
die (plural for all)
Note that : In German all nouns are written with an initial capital letter; for example: der Betrieb. This makes nouns easy to identify when reading German.
Nouns as well as articles may change their forms; this indicates their varying relationships to other parts of the sentence. This is referred to as 'cases'; there are four cases in German. |
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