You are all familiar with nouns, correct? A person, place, thing or idea. There are three types of nouns in Norwegian:
masculine, feminine and neuter. Each noun gender has it's own seperate articles. In English the articles are, "a",
"an", and "the". In Norwegian, the article depends on the nouns gender:
Masculine: en stol (a chair), en bok (a book)
Feminine: ei/en mark (a field), ei/en seng (a bed)
Neuter: et hus (a house), et dyr (an animal)
Notice that the indefinite article (a, an) for feminine nouns can be the same as the masculine ones. This is because
most feminine nouns can be treated as masculine nouns, forming what is known as the common gender.
Now, there aren't any rules for knowning the gender of a noun, so it is best to learn each noun with it's article.
So, don't learn seng; learn ei/en seng.
I suppose you are wondering about "the", right? Well, contrary to most other European languages, the definite article
(the) is suffixed to the noun (meaning that it is added to the end of the noun). For the definite article, we simply
suffix the indefinite article to the end of the noun!
Masculine: en stol - stolen (the chair)
Feminine: ei mark - marka (the field, also marken)
Neuter: et hus - huset (the house)
Easy!
