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The Easy Way To Pluralise Words in German
The Easy Way To Pluralise Words in German
If languages came “naturally” to me, then I would have aced German the
first time round. I didn’t. I spent five years studying German at high school,
and I got a C as my final grade. I couldn’t even order a train ticket in
German when I visited Munich a few years ago.
After just three months of living in Germany, I passed four out of five
sections of Goethe Institut’s Zentrale Oberstufenprüfung (German mastery
exam).
What changed? I stopped telling myself how hard German was and started
focusing on the positive. Creating a positive filter made the language easy
for me.
This isn’t about fooling yourself with empty mantras or willing the universe
to make it easy for you. There are very logical and systematic ways of
looking at German to make sure that you keep this positive feedback loop
up and make swift progress in the language.
To create this guide, I took the “hardest” grammar and vocabulary points
and presented them in a new way that shows you how you can learn
German as quickly as possible.
This question comes up a lot, but it ignores the many irregular plurals we
have in English, too.
By far the most common plural ending for feminine nouns in German (and
occasionally for some masculine or neuter ones) is –n or –en. This sounds
familiar when you look at certain English words, like “ox/en” and “child/ren”.
In English we actually did this quite a lot in the past! The archaic/poetic
word brethren, now used in fraternal order, actually used to be the standard
plural form of “brother” (initially written brether).
This is even more evident in word root changes. For example, English has
“foot”/”feet”, “(wo)man”/”men”, “tooth”/”teeth”, “mouse”/”mice”,
“goose”/”geese”. This is actually more complicated than the German
equivalent of adding an umlaut and no ending or –e/-erendings in words
like Hand/Hände, Wand/Wände, Nacht/Nächte, Apfel/Äpfel, Vater/Väter.
Once again, it’s ordinarily suggested that you simply learn the plural as you
learn the word (so theoretically, every time you meet a new word you’d
have to learn the gender, the plural, and the word itself, as well as any
special case declensions – phew, sounds exhausting!)
Masculine:
Most masculine nouns have a plural in -e or ¨e. The umlaut goes over about
half of the nouns where it would be possible (i.e. not over i or e),
g. Arm/Arm(e), Hund/Hund(e), Fuß/Füß(e), Stuhl/Stühl(e).
Most masculine nouns ending in -el, -en, or -er form their plural without an
ending or umlaut, g. Onkel, Bäcker, Computer (same in singular and plural).
A small number of masculine nouns have the plural -en or -n, especially
“weak nouns” (see any grammar book explanation for what this means).
Feminine:
Over 90% of all feminine nouns have the plural -en/-n, g. Arbeit(en),
Regel(n), Studentin(nen) (the last n gets doubled for -in ending nouns).
About a quarter of feminine monosyllables have a plural in ¨e,
g. Hand/Händ(e), Nacht/Nächt(e), Stadt/Städt(e), etc.
Neuter:
About three quarters of neuter nouns have the plural -e, e.g. Bein(e),
Jahr(e).
Slightly less than a quarter of neuter nouns have the plural ¨er/-er. The
umlaut is used if possible and the majority are either mon- osyllabic,
e.g. Dorf/Dörf(er), Kind/Kind(er), or start with ‘Ge’, e.g. Gesicht(er),
Gehalt(er), Geschlecht(er).
Neuter nouns ending in -el, -en, -er (note that this is the same as for
masculine); diminutives ending in -chen, -lein; and words formed with ..e all
have the same plural as the singular form, e.g. Mädchen, Gebäude,
Messer, Kissen.
-s is used with many recent loan-words from English or French: Chef(s),
Hotel(s), Restaurant(s), Team(s), Tunnel(s), and for abbreviations
like LKW(s) and for most words ending in a vowel other than unstressed -
e: Auto(s), Genie(s)
There are other possibilities and very occasional exceptions, but these rules
cover the vast majority of the nouns you will ever come across in German.
Ideally, you would learn the proper plural of nouns as you come across
them, but since this may not be practical if your priority is to communicate
as much as possible in a short time, you will, once again, be better
off guessing.
This is another situation where I can confirm from personal experience that
Germans will understand you perfectly well if you use the wrong plural. Just
like if a beginner English learner said to you that he saw six “mouses”, it
would sound a little weird, but you would understand it no problem.
In an academic examination you would lose points for writing down the
wrong plural; however, with human beings you will gain points for actually
saying something, rather than keeping your mouth shut for fear of saying it
wrong.
Use this rule of thumb, then try to learn the above list, and finally get
feedback from natives and spend more time reading, and you will quickly
see the exceptions.
As always, this is not a perfect solution, but saying a word in what sounds
like plural will get you further. The context and use of numbers
or die (genderless plural article, even though it’s the same as the feminine
article) will make it much clearer that you mean plural.
This blog post is an extract from my language hacking guide Why
German is Easy. Pick up your own copy here!