It is essential to know what grammatical gender german nouns possess as these will determine the endings of articles and adjectives of the sentences we create. As a result I would always suggest that every time a new noun is learnt, it is learnt together with the article and also the plural form. However this does not just have to be based on memory - there are many rules of endings that consistently determine the grammatical gender of a noun. For instance, words ending in -schaft, -heit, or -keit are generally all feminin.