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Talking about things; Definite articles
You already now from the previous lesson, that in German, all nouns and Names (people or places) have
to be spelled with upper case letters.
Another thing about German nouns that is different from what you know
from English, is the fact that every German noun has a gender, which means that it is either
'masculine', 'feminine', or 'neuter'. This is also partly true for English, where you could say
that all things have a neuter gender, but in German, there are barely any rules about how to
memorize, which noun has what gender.
For example, the word 'Buch' (book) is neuter, but the word 'Lampe' (lamp) is feminine and the word
'Arm' (arm) is masculine. It doesn't make sense, does it? The gender specificity of German nouns makes
German a difficult language, but one could also say that this makes German richer, more diverse and
more sophisticated than other languages.
The gender in German can be indicated by the definite articles, which always precede their nouns. Since
there are three genders, there are also three different definite articles:
| masculine | | feminine | | neuter |
 | der | | die | | das |
Study the following things and memorize the German gender of each of those things:
Note that the words 'der Student' and 'der Lehrer' can be made feminine in German
by attaching the ending '-in' and changing the article to 'die'.
This is a general principle that can be applied to most nouns in German
that describe an activity for example jobs.
Even though it is hard and wearisome to memorize the gender along with each German word, it is a very important
task. If you don't know the gender of a noun, there will be plenty of consecutive mistakes that you will
make, because a lot of endings and other grammatical building blocks that you will have to use
depend strongly on the gender of the nouns used.
But don't panic either. It's ok not to know something that is hard to
memorize, due to missing clear gender-rules. The key to this whole gender learning is repetition and exercising,
both of which you will do a lot on the following pages and in the coming lessons.
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Lesson 2
