Quote Originally Posted by yswaq View Post
Are there any nouns that refer to males AND females without changing form according to gender? It would have a "ь" at the end, wouldn't it?

And I'm also having some confusion about the word человек. It means "person", right? People usually use it when talking to an older guy. Would they do the same thing with an older woman? What is the feminine version of человек?
«ь» at the end of a word indicates that the ending is soft. However, those words still have gender cases and, unfortunately, you just have to memorize which words are masculine, and which are feminine. For example:

тетрадь is feminine

словарь is masculine.

I wish there was a trick that could be used to remember which words belong to which gender, but to my knowledge there is no such thing.

As for the друга topic:

друга is masculine, it has just been declined from the nominative case друг into either genative, or accusative (depending on the context).

У моего друга есть футбольный мяч. --- Is in an example of genative case declination of друг

Она любит своего друга. --- Is in an example of accusative case declination of друг


Человек

Человек can mean either man or woman (person), but many times is often regarding a man, from what I know. In my class, we usually assosiate Человек with man (person - if we are unsure of the context), and usually address women as женщина.


I hope that I have helped some.