81 Comments
Dative, accusative... i cant use them well in a sentence yet, how could i know how to use them??
How my teacher taught the cases were with questions. His example sentence was always "He throws me the ball."
For nominative, "who or what is 'verb'ing?", and the answer to this question will be the subject, in the nominative case. For the example sentence, the answer is "He" because "he" is throwing the ball to me.
For accusative, "Who or what is being 'verb'ed?" the answer for this question will be the direct object, the accusative case. For the example, the answer is "the ball" because "the ball" is being thrown by "he."
For dative, "to whom or for whom is the direct object being 'verb'ed?" and the answer for this question will be the indirect object in the dative case. For the example "me" is the indirect object because "the marker" is being thrown to "me."
Of course, these questions do not apply if the noun is preceded by an accusative (gegen, ohne, um, bis, für, entlang, durch) or a dative preposition (aus, außer, bei, mit, nach, von, seit, zu) which will put them into their respective cases.
I'm a little overwhelmed by this post. How are we expected to pick this up if there's no explicit explanation?
To be honest. From what I've learned. Just go with it. Eventually on everything you get an aha moment and it clicks into place a few lessons in. That's what I've been learning
I love that reply. That is true. I have experienced that myself and I have to remember that.
I hate these long posts with tons of english 101 terms that we all forgot. Ill try to be simple.
The dog plays.
Der Hund spielt
The dog plays with me
Der Hund spielt mit mir.
The dog is the center of focus and deserves the das der or die.
“me“ is an afterthought and deserves the mir, or meinem whatever is taught in this section.
Hope that helps.
that makes it more simply put than the former exp. ive been learning slowly, painfully much to the dismay of my new german partner. but this is cool and thanks everyone for the tips :)
The grammar is a lot like French, so that kind of helps (if you already know French)
Amazingly lucid explanation. I hope you thanked your teacher, because he's smart :)
I found this, and it helped me a lot.
The things you hear about direct / indirect objects apply to an extent, but there are also some prepositions that are used with accusative, so in general, you just have to learn which prepositions are used with which case (which is made easier by the way these skills seem to be organized).
Of course, there are also prepositions which are used with both the dative and the accusative - as far as I know, the difference is then in whether you want to describe: - movement to a location ("I'm climbing onto the roof") - accusative - static position in a location ("I'm standing on the roof") - dative
I just got this four times in one exercise. Is Duolingo trying to tell me something?
In the dative case, meinem goes before masculine or neuter singular nouns, meiner goes before feminine singular nouns, and meinen goes before plural nouns.
Accusative: Masc. Sing: "meinen" Fem. Sing: "meine" Neuter Sing.: "mein" Plural: "meine"
The nominative is the same as the accusative except the masculine singular is "mein" (just like in the neuter)
Genitive (for possession): Masc. Sing: "meines" Fem. Sing: "meiner" Neuter Sing.: "meines" Plural: "meiner"
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"My" is expressing possession. So shouldn't it always be in the Genitive case? Please let me know what I'm missing here. Thanks.
So to apply this in a complex sentence? His (gen fem?) young (nom fem?) mother threw the red (nom masc?) balls to my brown (dat masc?) dog's twin (gen neu?) puppies. ???
There is basically no difference. It is so stupid! (>_<) why can't they just stick with one word?
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Even though I thought the answer was "meinem" (Dative), I listened to the narrator over and over and - as others have commented below - was convinced she was saying "meinen". :-(
Using the slow playback distorts the speech, which can be very deceptive, causing problems such as hearing meinen instead of meinem. A native German speaker confirmed the distortion thing to me, and said to be careful when using slow playback because it can cause problems for non-native speakers.
So, I am a little confused here. It is not about dative or accusative, it is about this "nicht". As far as I understood if I want to negate the whole sentence I am putting this "nicht" at the end of it, right? So, in this case, the sentence is finished, there is not anything more to say - I am not speaking with my father, it doesn't stand that I'm not speaking with him but I'm speaking with someone else, or something like that. So, if anyone could explain a little bit more, I wold be grateful...
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Learning foreign language is always tough for some. I myself learn it through the hard way without knowledge of proper and poor in grammers! Repeatative of word and construction of sentences make us remember better even though in very slow pace!
I am always confuse on when to use Mein, meinem, meiner etc.. can someone please help me out?
Have a look at the above posts (recondite007 and c3230). Someone has posted this already
Singular Dative, action towards. So "I don't speak with" (I don't say anything to) = "Ich spreche nichts mit meinem Vater".
does this mean the same as "I do not talk to my father"? Or does this mean "I do not speak alongside/together with my father"?
That happened with me too when I listened to the slow version. It said "nichts"
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I hoped this discussion would explain when one uses meine versus meinem or meinen. I don't understand which is the appropriate one to use in which circumstance.
Meinem meiner meinem meinen Meinen meine mein meine Meines meiner meines meiner
hm... i thought "mit" will make Acc. so why is it "meinem vater" insted of "meinen vater"?
mit + AKK for der >> mit ...(den) right? seems not! seems mit can make a Dat too!
i cannot figure out when to use when version of the word, no explanation of mein, meine, meinem. please explain...Danke!
In English it is more correct to say: I do not speak to my father. When he speaks we listen to him
why can't we get someone who can clearly pronounce? I listerned carefully, over and over and she clearly says meinen not meinem.
It is hard to notice the difference only by hearing it. It's important to know the grammar rules, and then you will know when it is "meinem" or "meinen" Meinem is only applied for the dative case for neuter and masculine words. When you see "mit" you don' t have to reason, it always implies a dative case So, "with my father" will always be "mit meinem Vater".
That is a good tip, thank you. Can I also ask at this moment, what it means "dative"? I thought I understood before, but I'm seeing right now that I didn't.
I am not a native speaker as well, but I'll try to explain it anyway. If I say "The man gives the woman a flower" I will have nominative, accusative and dative case in one sentence in german. "Der Mann geben der Frau eine Blume" "Der Man" is the subject, it is "der man" who is executing the action - so it is the nominative case. "Der Frau" is the inderect object, that means the one who is receiving something from the subject (in this case, the man). It is "der Frau" instead "die Frau" because is in this case it is an inderect object (dativ). And what the man is giving the woman? A flower! This is the accusative case - the direct object. As "flower" in german is feminine, it stays the same in the accusative case. The concept itself isn't difficult to undesrtand. What it makes difficult is that the same article can be used for different genders on different cases - as "Der" (masculine for nominative case, feminine for the dative case).
Anyway, it's always good to have a support list near: http://german.about.com/library/blcase_dat.htm
Yes, but just a li'l typo, it's "indirect", not "inderect". (maybe you've made a habit of typing "der" from Deutsch)
Dative is the third Kasus in German. There are two ways of having Dative in the sentence: it either depends on a verb or on a preposition. In this case it hangs on the verb. In this sentence you even have three ways to find out this is dative: one, this is a person and an indirect object, sprechen (mit) is a verb used with dative and the preposition "mit" is always used with dative. Basically, when the dative depends on a verb, it's always about a person (or generally living thing). But then there are verbs with accusative, like verstehen (Verstehst du mich?). To easily say what casus should you use, you can ask "wem?" for third and "wen?" for the fourth casus. If you don't hear the difference here, you can ask "wem geben?" and "wen beschuldigten?" I just want to point out that in the leoniscarlotis' explanation (perfect one) it should be "Der Mann gibt der Frau eine (die) Blume." It's not "geben", because this is third person singular.
