German · Chapter 7 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer
Compound nouns
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
A German compound's gender comes from its last word
Straßenbahn is feminine because Bahn is feminine, not because Straße is. Whatever noun sits at the very end of a compound decides der, die or das for the whole word, so when you meet an unfamiliar compound, read to the end before you guess the article.
die Straßenbahn, der Geburtstag
That -s in Geburtstag is not a possessive
It looks exactly like an English birth's day, but it isn't one. Feminine nouns ending in -ung, -heit, -keit or -schaft reliably take a connecting -s when they lead a compound, and so do some ending in -t, like Geburt and Arbeit (but not Zeit in Zeitschrift). The -s is a fossil of the old genitive, now simply a fixed part of the word.
der Geburtstag
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 18 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 8 of 21 in this chapter