Nouns and Cases

All nouns have a gender in German, either masculine, feminine or neuter.  There really isn't a lot of logic to which nouns are which gender, so you must memorize the gender of each noun.  Male persons or animals, the seasons, months, and days are all masculine, as are nouns ending in -ant, -ast, -ich, -ig, -ismus, -ling, -or and -us.  Female persons or animals, German rivers and numerals are all feminine, as are nouns ending in -a, -anz, -ei, -enz, -heit, -ie, -ik, -in, -keit, -schaft, -sion, -sis, -tät, -tion, -ung and -ur.  Young persons or animals, metals, chemical elements, letters of the alphabet, hotels, restaurants, cinemas, continents, countries and provinces are all neuter, as are nouns that end in -chen, -icht, -il, -it, -lein, -ma, -ment, -tel, -tum, and -um.  Nouns referring to things that end in -al, -an, -ar, -ät, -ent, -ett, -ier, -iv, -o and -on, as well as most words with the prefix ge- and most nouns ending in -nis and -sal are also neuter.  All nouns in German are capitalized as well.

All nouns (as well as pronouns and adjectives) have a case depending on what function they serve in the sentence.  These may seem strange, but remember that English uses cases also; however, we would say direct object instead of accusative, or indirect object instead of dative.  Although these cases may make learning new words difficult, they actually help with word order because the position of words in a sentence is not as crucial in German as it is in English.  And the reason for that is because words can occur in these four cases:

Note:  The nouns I give you, and the ones you look up in a dictionary, will be in the nominative case.