![]() T he dog, a dog, my dog, his dog, this dog, no dog, etc… The spelling of the “accompany-er” will change slightly depending on the gender of the noun it is accompanying, and, you guessed it, what case the noun is. Learning the genders of your nouns is absolutely fundamental for understanding how to use the cases correctly, and as most somewhat advanced learners will know, the gender lies in the “accompanying word”, or, the article. And, when an entity is a noun (it is either that, or a person), then we have to remember the other really annoying thing about the German language: Genders. Each entity in a sentence will be in a specific case, depending on what relationship it has with the other entity. Another example would be I (one entity) see you (another entity). For example: The child (one entity) feeds the dog (another entity). The first question a learner might have is: What is a case? Or why are there cases? A case demonstrates the relationship of one entity (noun or pronoun) to another entity in a sentence. For now, here is an easy guide to understanding German cases. It is important to note that the saying “exceptions prove the rule” was coined for a reason, so here, too, an advanced German learner, or instructor will quickly be able to tell you: “Well, that’s not always the case!” But that’s OK. And then, when putting it all together again, we will (hopefully) have a better understanding of how it all works together. But in order to really understand them, it helps to break it all down to the very basics and examine all the parts. When trying to learn how to use German cases, you can of course look up a quick chart. ![]() German has four cases: the nominative, the genitive, the dative and the accusative (German spelling: der Nominativ, der Genitiv, der Dativ, der Akkusativ). When you ask language learners what the most difficult part of learning German is, many of them will agree: It is understanding and using the grammatical cases.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |