Articles – ever paid much attention to them? These are those short little words like a, an, and the. If you are a native speaker of English and if you have never tried to learn a language like Spanish, French, or German, you probably haven’t.

If you want to learn German, however, you may want to start paying attention to articles. German has three articles that are used at different times where English only uses the word “the”. In German “the man” is “der Mann”, “the woman” means is “die Frau”, and “the child” is “das Kind”.

Every noun in German is either masculine (and has the article “der”), feminine (“die) or neuter (“das”). Using the correct article with each noun is important if you want to avoid sounding like a foreigner but it’s not that important if you just want to be understood.

Matching the right article to every noun very important to German teachers. However it’s very important to (more…)