KS3 · German · Year 7
Christmas: 'Es gibt' with plurals, the song 'O Tannenbaum'
Christmas: singular and plural nouns
Learn it. Recall it. Make it stick.
IllumED Slides
IllumED · 1/10
Your learning goal
I can apply masculine and neuter plural rules 1 and 2 to build sentences with ‘es gibt’ and ‘viele’.
1 of 10
Christmas: 'Es gibt' with plurals, the song 'O Tannenbaum': slides adapted from the imported teaching text; recall questions created from its keywords, learning points and common mistakes. Self-check practice, with no automatic grading or XP. Answers stay on this page and are cleared when you leave.
Original teaching resources
The original illustrated PowerPoint is available as well as the IllumED text slides. It retains the publisher’s design and credits.
Download original PowerPoint ↓What you’ll learn
I can apply masculine and neuter plural rules 1 and 2 to build sentences with ‘es gibt’ and ‘viele’.
Key learning points
- 'Es gibt' means 'there is' or 'there are' and 'viele' means 'lots of' or 'many'.
- [ü] can be either short (followed by 2 or more consonants) or long (followed by a single consonant or 'h').
- For noun plural rule 1, most masculine and neuter nouns add -e to the end and an umlaut on the vowel (ä,ö, ü).
- For noun plural rule 2, words ending in -el, -en or -er are often the same in the plural.
- ‘O Tannenbaum’ is a popular German Christmas song and translates as ‘O fir tree’.
Words to know
- [ü]
- pronounced short [ü] as in 'fünf' and long [ü] as in 'Tür'
- es gibt
- 'there is' or 'there are'
- viele
- lots of, many
Common mistakes
All nouns change in their plural form.
Different nouns have different rules for forming plurals. It is important to learn these and acknowledge that there will always be exceptions to any rule.
For parents, carers and teachers
- 'O Tannenbaum' doesn't translate directly as 'O Christmas tree', but instead as 'O fir tree'. It is based on a 16th-century folk song by Melchior Franck.