To be able to recognise individual words, you must at first “cognise“ them, know them. This step is what you have been preparing for with the help of the steps before. By the time you have reached this step, you should be familiar with the meaning and the sounds of most words that you are listening to. But take things easy. Do not expect to be perfect too soon. Understanding words that you don’t know yet remains a challenge and it will certainly take you a few months until you can comfortably follow a conversation among Germans.

Below you'll find a list of nearly all articles available in German:

the: der, das, die, den, dem, des
a: ein, eine, einen, einem, einer, eines
my: mein, meine, meinen, meinem, meiner meines
not-a: kein, keine, keinen, keinem, keiner, keines
which: welcher, welches, welche, welchen, welchem
this: dieser, dieses, diese, diesen, diesem

Don't worry. I'll guide you through this chaos step by step in this course:

Not really. The gender system is basically a set of three boxes labelled: (m)asculine, (n)euter and (f)eminine. In each of these boxes there lies a set of articles. E.g. in the (m)asculine box you can only find e.g. the articles "der, den, dem, des" and never a "die" or a "das". And that's really it. Gender is the top term for a specific, unchangeable group of articles. Clear?

Let me just quickly repeat what a noun is: A noun is simply the name of any word that in English takes a "the" by default like e.g. the car, the door, the liberty etc. In German you can recognize nouns easily when reading as they are all (!) capitalized. That means you will never see "das haus" but only "das Haus". That's really all.