This means it acts like a weather vane of a sort: when reading or listening to German, the articles serve as a way to tell you the way a sentence is going. What does change is the article in front of the word. One thing that makes things a little easier is that German wasn’t completely immune to the changes its neighbors underwent: as such, the actual noun only changes rarely, most of the time it stays the same. Though we don’t use it except in pronouns in English, most learners seem to pick it up pretty easily.Īll this may seem a little exhausting, but you’d be surprised how soon you get used to it all. Just wonder what is the verb acting on and you’ll have it. ![]() To call back to our first example “Jim looks at his car,” the car is the object. The fourth case ( vierter Fall) is another relatively simple one as it denotes the object of the sentence. To find the indirect object, the best way is to ask “to or for whom is this?” and you’ll likely find it. So, in the sentence “Jim gave a present to Jill,” Jim is the subject, the present is the direct object and Jill is the indirect object. The indirect object is the part of the sentence that is receiving something from the direct object. This is because the dative denotes the indirect object of a sentence, something we English speakers don’t bother about much. The dative or third case ( dritter Fall) is the one that gives most learners the biggest headache, especially if they speak a language like English. It’s not as foreign to English speakers as you may think at first, we more or less use it, too: in a sentence like “the woman’s car” you’re using a possessive, in German you just need to switch it around: das Auto der Frau. You use this to denote when somebody or something belongs to or with something or somebody else. ![]() The second case ( zweiter Fall) is the possessive or genitive case. Generally speaking, it’s the easiest one to get used to as you already use it in a way, every word is in this mode in languages like English. When a word is the subject of a sentence, it’s in the nominative: when you say “Jim looks at his car,” Jim is the subject of that sentence. Think of it as the standard version, the word as it is at home with its slippers on. The first case ( erster Fall) is the nominative or subject case. More modern systems just number them to make sure there’s no confusion, we’ll use both ways of doing it. If you’re learning German from an older textbook, it probably uses the old, Latin-derived terms for the cases. It’s not like in modern Greek, where you can ignore the fourth, vocative case because it’s barely used, something we explain in our piece on why Greek is easy to learn. Not only did German keep its case system, it hung on to all of it: it has four of them and uses them in daily conversation. German is unique among Germanic languages in that it hung on to its cases (called Fall (s.) and Fälle (pl.) in German), even as its neighbors got rid of them.įor example, when you compare Dutch vs German, it’s probably the biggest difference when it comes to grammar verbs and pronouns more or less behave the same way in both languages. However, most Slavic languages still use cases, as do Greek, Finnish and a number of Asian languages (see this list). Most languages of Germanic origin - including English - still use cases for pronouns but not for nouns, as do many Romance languages such as French or Spanish. ![]() Though in both cases we’re talking about a man, it’s clear it’s two different people you can tell because he is the subject of the sentence, while him is the object. So we say he saw him walk down the street. We don’t use them for nouns anymore in English (Old English did though), but we do still use them for pronouns. You could fill a library with books written about what cases are exactly, but in short it’s when a noun or pronoun changes form depending how it’s used in a sentence. So in this guide, I’ll cover the four German cases so you can get a better understanding of how they work, when to use them, and what to do when you’re not sure. In my guide on why German isn’t as hard as you think, I explained that German actually isn’t as bad as you thought, as long as you learn and respect the rules of the language. If you’re learning German, you may find yourself confused by noun cases.Ĭases are a foreign concept for English speakers new to German.
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