Das -chen
Some non-English languages have a standard way to modify nouns to create diminutives. This is a particularly wonderful feature that lets you take a word and make it more "cute", emphasizing its littleness and smallness.
| Original | Diminutive |
|---|---|
die Katze the cat | das Kätzchen the kitten |
das Brot the bread | das Brötchen the bread roll |
der Pantoffel, das Tier the slipper, the animal | das Pantoffeltierchen a unicellular protozoan of the Paramecium genus |
Do you see the pattern? These kinds of diminutives are always neuter, no matter what gender the base word originally had! So even if you haven't seen a specific word before, you know you can use das if it ends in -chen.
Diminutives can also end in -lein, which is similarly always das, but this is much less common than -chen in modern German. Words ending in -lein tend to sound pretty old-fashioned.
Some nouns are used mainly in their diminutive form. For example, das Eichhörnchen is more common than das Eichhorn. das Mädchen refers to a young girl, while the root die Magd (the maid) would sound very archaic in comparison.