Basic Nouns

In Norwegian, nouns are words used to name people, places, things, and ideas — just like in English. These can be simple words, such as katt (cat) or hus (house). However, unlike English, Norwegian nouns have one of three genders: masculine, feminine, or neuter.

Gender is important because it determines which article you use with the noun. For example, to say "a dog," you would use the article en, making it en hund. This is because hund is a masculine noun and takes the masculine indefinite article. Similarly, to say "a house," you would use the article et, making it et hus, because hus is a neuter noun and takes the neuter indefinite article.

This course will teach you using Bokmål. In Bokmål, while there are still three genders, it is common to use the masculine article en for many traditionally feminine nouns as well. For example, both ei bok and en bok (a book) are correct, but you'll often hear en bok more frequently in modern usage.

This course follows that convention, using en for most masculine and feminine nouns, and et for neuter nouns. When nouns appear in the vocabulary list, you'll learn them together with their appropriate article.

Below is a short list of nouns with their correct indefinite articles. "Indefinite" means "a," as in "a cat" or "a book." In the list, hus (house) and barn (child) are neuter nouns. Katt (cat) is masculine, and Bok (book) and jente (girl) are feminine. However, the last two also take the article en due to the Bokmål convention.

You will learn more about the meaning of "indefinite" in the next lesson.