22 easy rules

German nouns can have 3 genders: masculine, feminine or neutral. Here are 22 rules to remember to guess the gender of a noun.

Masculine Feminine Neutral
-tz -ung -hen
-ck -it -chen
  -eit -ren
  -te  
  -ion  
  -se  
  -ie  
  -le  
  -tion  
  -rin  
  -rung  
  -ge  
  -erin  
  -keit  
  -ne  
  -de  
  -tung  

22 rules to guess the gender of a word in german




Why is it important

3 genders: der, die, das

The three genders in german are the following:

Masculine Feminine Neutral
der die das

You will need to know which words are which gender, since it changes other words in the sentences.. Different cases will be different according to the gender of the noun.




An example

In Accusative, for instance.

Masculine Feminine
den roten Bleistift - “The red pencil” die neue Lampe - “The new lamp”

Masculine and accusative have a different form than feminine. There are many such cases. In the example given in English, there is no such difference.

Because of these differences, you need to learn (or guess) the gender of each noun.

For a lot more details, check the Article on the statistics of german nouns gender rules




Thanks for reading