Fifty nouns for building your German vocabulary – part three

Part three of the series moves from verbs to nouns: fifty German nouns for people, for time, and for the things around you at home. A German noun is never learned bare but always with its article, because it is the article that later changes with case.

The table below carries twenty-five nouns with their articles. Learn the article with the word from the first time and do not defer it — correcting it later is harder than learning it right at the start.

Why a store of words is built by volume, not by rule

Grammar organises what you already know; it does not produce what you do not. Someone who still cannot speak in the street after a year of study is usually short of words, not of rules. That is why this series comes in batches: fifty words at a time, heard, repeated and used, rather than analysed and explained. Anyone measuring their own progress knows that the distance between one level and the next is counted in words before it is counted in anything else.

Twenty-five nouns with their articles – people, time and the home

How to fix a word so it does not slip away

• Listen to the part once through, then again while pronouncing along with it, not after it
• Split the fifty over five days, ten a day — a single large batch is forgotten whole
• Review yesterday's words before starting today's; two minutes are enough
• Write one sentence per word taken from your own life, not from a book
• Review the whole part after a week and again after a month — spacing is what moves a word into long-term memory
• Anything forgotten twice goes on a small separate list and is reviewed on its own

Frequently asked questions

How do I memorise each noun's article?
By colour. Give each article a colour in your notebook and write the word in it. The eye retains the colour before the mind retains the rule.

Are there rules that help?
Some useful partial ones: nouns ending in -ung, -heit, -keit, -schaft are feminine; those in -chen and -lein are neuter. The rest must be learned.

Why does the article matter so much?
Because it is what changes in the accusative and the dative — get it wrong at the start and everything built on it is wrong too.

Should I learn the plural as well?
Yes, all three from day one: article, singular, plural. It costs less time than coming back for it two months later.

Watch the video

The video is on the OK+ channel on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MW-dKDz6BA

Also on OK+

• Fifty verbs for building your German vocabulary – part two
• Fifty nouns for building your German vocabulary – part four
• Learn German A1 – lesson 1

A tool that shortens the road

The OK Plus DE app gathers German administrative calculators and form templates in one place, free, ad-free, in seven languages. Android and iPhone, from the same page:
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