Akkusativ Nominativ Dativ

[newpotato]

Hi. I am learning German and am confused by Akkusativ Nominativ etc. Can anybody put it into simple terms please?

[Buenchico]

Any use?
http://www.jabbalab.com/blog/795/how-the-german-cases-work-nominative-accusative-dative-and-genitive

or, possibly, . . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JzI_DVQFN4

[jourdain2]

If you have a copy of 'Heute Abend' (book my teacher used) you will find a chart near the beginning which explains everything and gives all the various ways of saying 'the' in German, according to usage. I'll do some thinking on it to see if I can simplify things, but your teacher should be explaining that.

How much English Grammar do you know? It helps. Khandro might be up-to-date with an explanation.

[grasscarp]

Nominative is subject Eg The table in a sentence like the table is in the middle of the room.
Accusative is the object. Eg the book in the sentence I like the book.
Genitive is possessive case. Eg money in sentence I have a lot of money
Dative case is to or for something Eg me in sentence He gave the pencil to me
Prepositional is after on or in. Eg the restaurant in sentence She is eating in the restaurant
Instrumental is what you use to do something. Eg pen in sentence he writes with a pen.

[Zacs-Master]

But surely the table in your first example is the object, so why isn't that the accusative?

[brainiac]

One of the (many) difficulties for an English-speaker in learning German, is memorising what case prepositions take: some take accusative, some take dative (some both!) and some genitive. English is not without its difficulties as a language, but at least you don't have to wrestle with preposition cases, nor do our nouns have genders - unlike most European languages; and German, of course has three genders, another reason it's tricky to learn

[grasscarp]

No it is the subject. Better example may be
I like books.
I is the subject and books the object.

[shaneystar2]

It isn't that simple ..lol This explains it all quite clearly though.
After donkeys years of speaking German I still get it wrong sometimes .
Click on each bit at the top and scroll down.
http://german.about.com/library/blcase_sum.htm

[grasscarp]

Brainiac I am learning Russian and it is exactly same with prepositional differences. Prepositional if you are there and accusative if you are going there.
I learnt Latin at school so used to cases. It helped me when I learnt Italian also.

[brainiac]

My point was that English speakers never have to think about cases, as, generally speaking, nothing changes. This is why it can be so difficult to learn a language like German (or Russian or Latin) if you've never been taught about cases. Having slogged my way through an MA in German (and French) several moons ago, I sometimes wonder how on earth I did it, as now I can remember very little of my German. Can still remember the lists of preps and their cases I learned 'parrot-fashion' at school, though!

[grasscarp]

In Latin it was (as you say parrot fashion)
Nominative vocative accusative genitive dative ablative.

[brainiac]

And let's not forget the aorist tense in Greek.....!

[KARL]

English speakers are notoriously poor linguists, possibly because English is not really a single language but a mixture of several. Grammatically there are only tiny remnants in English of cases (nominative, accusative, etc.) in the pronouns: I/me, we/us, she/her, he/him, they/them - the apostrophe-"s" is a form of genitive. The simplification process continues in our time, although some of that is plain error as in "It's best for my wife/husband and I" (possibly an over-correction to "Me and him are going") - an absence of feel for language because you wouldn't say "It's best for I". Pidgin may in the end win.

It doesn't make things easier that the gender for the same thing is not necessarily the same from foreign language to language and, famously, the German word for "girl" is neuter. However, with the possible exception of native French speakers, the vast majority of people worldwide are simply thrilled to meet a foreigner who tries to speak the local language - no matter that the grammar is wrong and the range of vocabulary is obviously a serious handicap.


The average native English speaker's clear determination to mispronounce every foreign word is very noticeable and overall this is possibly the single biggest obstacle to changing their international reputation. The consistently wrong emphasis on names in particular and failure to faithfully copy sounds repeated to them in general is, to foreigners, both baffling and comical. But there is at least consistency in the absurdity as English is mangled by its own people: Consider "my child's drawring" and "he came sickth in the race".

[Sokrates5]

You're not the only one struggling with the cases. Here is my explanation in simple terms and with examples: https://www.olesentuition.co.uk/single-post/der-die-das-explaining-the-cases-in-german