Free Der Die Das Quiz

How the der die das quiz works

Pick a set of nouns, and the quiz shows them one at a time with their English meaning. Tap der, die or das, or press 1, 2 or 3 on a keyboard. The right answer appears at once with the noun's plural, and Enter takes you to the next noun, so you can work through a set from the keyboard.

A running score stays on screen. If you'd rather see the German noun on its own, hide the English meaning. When you reach the end, you can practice only the nouns you missed.

2,440 everyday German nouns

We built the list from the nouns that come up most often in German film and TV subtitles. Rare words, verb forms and slang came out, and every noun that stayed got an English meaning. That left 2,440 nouns: 972 take der, 997 take die and 471 take das. Das is the smallest group by far, so if you guess das with nothing else to go on, you'll be wrong about four times in five.

You don't have to take all 2,440 at once. Choose a set of 100 nouns, 300 or 1,000, or all of them. Or choose the set of nouns whose ending gives the gender away, which comes with the exceptions to each rule.

What you see after each answer

Every answer comes back with the noun's plural. That's more useful than it looks, because every German plural takes die, so the plural can never tell you the gender later. Learn der Hund with die Hunde, not Hunde on its own.

Where the noun's ending is a rule, the quiz adds the rule and how often it holds in our dictionary. Where the noun breaks the rule, it tells you that instead: "An exception: most nouns ending in -e take die (7,265 of the 8,449 in our dictionary), but not this one." Der Name, der Junge and das Auge are exceptions of that kind.

Der die das practice by ending

The endings set holds only the nouns whose ending gives the gender away, plus the nouns that break each rule. Some of those rules are close to certain. In our dictionary, 4,030 of the 4,071 nouns ending in -ung are feminine, and every noun ending in -keit is too. Others are a strong lean and no more: about 86 percent of nouns in -e take die, and about 84 percent of nouns in -er take der.

Because the exceptions come mixed in, you learn each rule together with the nouns it doesn't cover. The German noun gender rules guide lists the rules with their counts and the everyday exceptions to learn first.

Nouns with two articles

Fifteen nouns in the quiz take two standard articles, such as der or das Laptop. For those, either answer counts, so you won't lose a point for the one you happened to learn.

Other nouns have two genders and a meaning for each. Der See is a lake and die See is the sea, and der Band, das Band and die Band are a volume, a ribbon and a band. When you meet one of those in a text, the der die das checker shows every gender with its meaning. For die Bank, which is a bench or a bank, it gives the plural of each as well: Bänke and Banken.

A quiz for practice, a checker for lookups

The quiz is for practice, one noun at a time. To look up the nouns from your own textbook, paste up to 100 at once into the der die das checker and copy them back with their articles. To see why an ending decides the gender, and which nouns break each rule, read the German noun gender rules. And once the articles are steady, the German verb conjugation quiz does the same job for verbs. It asks for one form at a time and marks each answer as you type it.

Frequently asked questions

Licenses and credits

German nouns, genders and plurals come from English Wiktionary through kaikki.org (CC BY-SA 4.0). The quiz's nouns are chosen by their frequency in FrequencyWords (Hermit Dave, from OpenSubtitles 2018, CC BY-SA 4.0), and their English meanings are written for NexaProva.