Laura Bennett
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Are you tired of sounding like a 7-year old learning how to read?
Working on using pronouns to replace nouns can really bring your German up to the next level.
Frank has a dog. Frank likes his dog. The dog likes Frank. ← Yikes.
Your German will sound more authentic if you don’t repeat all those nouns, but use pronouns instead (e.g. Frank likes him).
German noun plurals is a tricky topic! Making matters worse, there is a lack of consensus on even how many different plural forms there are (5? 6? 9?).
To write this guide for you, I ended up nerding out on a major German noun plurals rabbit hole.
And — would you believe it? — some of the BEST resources on German plurals that I found were written in 1914 and 1882. 😮 The German in these books was in old script and everything!
Turns out, there are lots of predictable patterns to German noun plurals (just like for German noun gender!).
If you’re like many of my students, you’ve been using Duolingo, watching YouTube, or learning German through various online tools. You picked up on those little words der, die, das that always come in front of nouns — der Mann, die Frau, das Kind, etc.
But why the difference? Why not just pick one — like our English ‘the’ — and use that?
The answer: all German nouns have gender. Everything from bee to bird to table and chair is either a masculine, feminine, or neuter noun.
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