This page contains some useful information about nouns. While I obviously cannot profess to any great knowledge of the Latin language, I hope what I have here may be of some use to somebody...
A noun is nay word representing a person, place or thing. Here are some italicised examples:
A noun can be either singular or plural in number. Plural nouns generally represent more than one of the noun. Singular nouns (like single) represent one of the noun.
For example:
English usually forms its plurals by adding -s, but there are other ways, like plateaux, oxen, etc
Since you must now be pretty sick of having to read singular and plural in every sentence (like this one), we'll abbreviate the two words to sg and pl respectively.
English is a nice language. When we talk about any noun, except one representing a person, we can use the word 'it'. Like:
The house is big. It is big enough to contain lots of booze.
Although we do say 'she' of a ship and of most countries. Latin has chosen to make us take more care. Every Latin noun fits into one of the three categories, masculine, feminine, or neuter. These names are confusing. A girl (puella) is feminine; a boy (puer) is masculine, and that is all pleasantly logical. A house (domus), however is masculine, and a sailor (nauta) is feminine. And a temple (templum) is neuter.
As you will see (and you will, trust me), it is essential that the gender of each noun be learnt with it. If you know French, German or another language the concept of gender is not so confusing. If you do not, try and think of masculine, feminine and neuter as categories, and place little emphasis on the natural gender of a noun when fitting it in one of these groups.
Masculine, feminine and neuter are abbreviated to m(asc), f(em) and n(euter).
Here are some little points that I want to point out before we leap out eagerly into the jungle that is the land of Latin's case system:
1. Latin has no indefinite or definite articles. This means that there are no words for 'a' or 'the' in Latin. Do not worry about this; you will know when to use 'a' or 'the' by the context.