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When my students come across German gender for the first time, and they’re learning whether a noun is masculine, feminine or neuter, they often despair. Then after a while they get used to it. And when they come across the plurals and they hear ‘Yes, there are different endings in the plural’, they despair again, and they’re saying, why can’t it be like English?
English is easy. Just put an S at the end and be done with it.
Actually, it isn’t. Okay, fair enough. Most English nouns end in S (tea, teas) but… Some add ES (hero, heroes) Y changes to IES (baby, babies) F can turn into VES (calf, calves).
Some stay the same ( sheep, sheep) Some change completely ( mouse, mice). So it isn’t really that easy either.
In that case, maybe the German plural isn’t quite as bad as some people think.
And the first bit of good news is you don’t have to worry about the gender. Whether the word is masculine, feminine or neuter, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to worry if it’s a der, die or das because in the plural, they’re all ‘die’.
The not so good news is that it is really best to learn a word with its gender and the plural. This is the recommendation you’ll find in virtually every textbook.
So if you’ve learned that the German word for table is Tisch, don’t just learn table = Tisch. Instead, learn Table = der Tisch(e).
And if you write it down, you could write it down like I’ve done there or you could have written der Tisch, die Tische.
That’s the best way to learn it. Learn all the time with the gender and the plural. Having said that, though, there are some rules worth knowing. Some of them are really good. Others are the typical German rules. You know, those rules which also have lots of exceptions, but it’s a good guess anyway.
In this blog post I’m telling you about one of those rules: Which German nouns take an e or umlaut & e in the plural?
The E ending is taken by many single syllable nouns. Unfortunately, it’s not all of them, but it is a good guess.
And also by nouns ending in EUR, ICH, IER, IG, LING, ÄR and ÖR
Examples:
Das Bein – Beine
Das Ereignis – Ereignisse (! an extra s)
Der Freund – Freunde
Der Friseur – Friseure
Das Heft – Hefte
Der Hund – Hunde
Das Jahr – Jahre
Der Jongleur – Jongleure
Der König – Könige
Der Ort – Orte
Das Papier – Papiere
Der Pensionär – Pensionäre
Der Schmetterling – Schmetterlinge
Der Schuh – Schuhe
Der Stift – Stifte
Der Tag – Tage
Der Teppich – Teppiche
Das Tier – Tiere
Der Tisch – Tische
This rule also applies to the compound nouns. For example der Stift. Any compound noun that ends in STIFT, ends in STIFTE in the plural. So if you had a Bleistift which is a pencil or a Buntstift, which is a colouring pencil, it would be Bleistifte, Buntstifte with always the E at the end.
Some single syllable nouns also take an umlaut as well as the E in the plural.
The umlaut would be on the a, o or u.
Der Arzt – Ärzte
Der Ball – Bälle
Der Bart – Bärte
Der Fluss – Flüsse
Die Hand – Hände
Der Korb – Körbe
Die Kuh – Kühe
Der Kuss – Küsse
Die Nuss – Nüsse
Der Sohn – Söhne
Die Stadt – Städte
Der Stuhl – Stühle
Die Wand – Wände
And again, that also applies to the compound nouns. So if you had more than one dentist (der Zahnarzt), that would be Zahnärzte.
This blog post and the following video has been taken from my online course German gender #2 – the plurals of German nouns. Check it out if you wish to learn more. And if you like and want to buy it, use the coupon code BLOG to get 10% off.
Alternatively, if you prefer books to videos, you’ll find this and lots more in my book German Gender – Is it der, die or das? which you can buy as paperback or kindle.
But the big question is: What do you do with these lists of words? Reading them is one thing, but to use them is better. You can prepare your own vocabulary list and then make sentences with them. You can do that with any paper or electronic notebook. Or you could buy my notebook which I designed specially for German vocab learners. It has space for vocabulary lists and sentences. You can even choose one of two colours ☺
