- Forum >
- Topic: German >
- "Wir haben ein Kleid."
28 Comments
It sounded like she said " Wir haben ein flight'??? Am I the only one who heard this?
Thats how it was when we were young. Cold, hungry, living in a patched-up refridgerator box. All of us sharing one dress.
I'm not sure this is the right place to ask - but when do I use "einen" and when do I use "einem"?
The article ein has to be inflected according to the grammatical gender and case of the noun: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ein#Declension_2
You use einen in the accusative case for masculine nouns and einem for dative case and masculine or neuter nouns.
„Ich habe einen Hund.“ – „I have a dog.“
„Ich gebe das Futter einem Hund.“ – „I give the food to a dog.“
EDIT: corrected an error regarding the inflections. Thanks to the fellow Duolinguists for pointing out the mistake.
2152
I am only a beginner but I think there is a small mistake in your answer; "einen" in the accusative case is only for masculine and not also for neuter nouns.
Examples:
Ich habe einen Hund (M) (I have a dog)
Ich habe ein Pferd (N) (I have a horse)
:-)
Can please a German native correct me if I am wrong?
Oh boy. This is confusing. Thank you for your answer! I guess my biggest problem is that I don't know what accusative / dative / etc means. English is not my mother tongue :( But your example sure helps.
I guess a comment here might not be enough to cover the grammatical cases of the German language, so I suggest you to read about their usage, for example here: http://german.about.com/library/blcase_sum.htm
BTW: Depending on your mother tongue your disadvantage might not be as big as you might expect. For example there is no dative case in English, either. I guess it all comes down to how easy it is to comprehend articles about the language's grammar. :-)
Wow, this article is about 9 pages long. I think I might need to quit Duolingo for a while just to read and completely understand it all :)
My mother tongue is Hebrew. Yeah... even I don't know what cases exist in that language. But I do hope the German grammar and I will get along eventually. Thanks for everything :)
- 641
Cases exist; they're described differently. In English we were taught nominative=subject, accusative=direct object, dative=indirect object; genitive=possessive.
Nominativ -- Der -- Die --Das -- die Or Mein -- meine -- mein -- meine
Dativ -- dem -- der -- dem-- den
Or Meinem --meiner-- meinem --meinen
N.B takes the ending N.B Dativ comes after some prepositions such as mit and von
Not anymore since we have no royals anymore. But yes, the royals used to use it. And you could still use it in a humorous way.
- 2127
In French, the similiar sentence means "Each one of us have a dress." Could anyone please explain, is this the same in German? "We together only have ONE dress" , or "Each one of us have a dress"?
In German „Wir haben ein Kleid.“ would usually mean “We together have one dress.”
In some situations it can also have to the other meaning, but I can't think of any situation about a dress.
„Emma Stone und Damien Chazelle haben einen Oscar.“
