Lesson 1: A Basic Toolkit of Everyday Words

Hi Katya! It’s a very good question, and will definitely be covered in the next lessons, but I am happy to answer here already: It has to do with the gender of the noun. Things (and people and animals) each have one of three possible genders in German and words like “ein/eine” change depending on the gender. In the examples you’ve seen in this lesson, “ein” is used for masculine and neuter words, and “eine” is used for feminine words.

WHEN we use those types of words is very similar to English, so with “uncountable” nouns (like bread, beer, water, plastic, rice, wood, money) we often use no article at all. So we can say “That’s bread” or “That’s a bread” (both work) but we can never say “That’s child”. In that respect, German is almost identical to English, but it’s challenging for students whose native language has no articles at all. Don’t worry, this will all make more sense as you go on with the course, we will cover these concepts extensively. If you want to learn more about gender, you can check out Module 2 Lesson 3 (it’s free for everyone, even if you didn’t buy the course yet).