VIDEO: Determine cases in one sentence

If you want to determine grammatical cases, you should first familiarize yourself with the individual parts of the sentence. These can be defined more precisely on the basis of the case determination.

Important information about the cases in German

• In total, you must be able to use and determine four cases in German. These are called nominative, genitive, dative and accusative.
• The individual parts of the sentence can be assigned to a case. Depending on the case, the endings must be adapted. You can easily understand this phenomenon with the following examples: "The brother gives me a book." But: "The brother's book is old."
• A sentence always consists of at least one nominative case. Further so-called objects in different cases can be added. An example of a short sentence in which at least the subject is present in the nominative is: "I'm running." In the sentence "Peter runs with Hans", on the other hand, contains two different objects in different cases, namely "Peter" and "with" Hans".

How to determine the cases in one sentence

If you want to determine the cases in a sentence, you must first locate the individual objects.

1. Start with the subject. You can recognize this by the fact that it identifies the person who caused an action in the sentence. You ask about the subject by thinking: Who or what is doing something in this sentence? Example: "The dog is playing in the garden." In this sentence, "The dog" is the subject, which is always in the first case, i.e. in the nominative.
2. You ask about the second case, the genitive, with the question word "whose". In the sentence "The neighbors' house is big." you can use the phrase "the neighbors" as Identify the genitive object by asking, "Whose house is big?" The answer is: "The house of the Neighbors is great. "
3. You determine the dative object by asking "Whom" for it. Example: "I will give you some advice." Question: "Who do I give advice to?" Answer: "I'll give you some advice."
4. The fourth case is determined by using the question words "Who" or "What". Example: "My mother gives me a dog." Question: "Whom or what is my mother giving me?" Answer: "My mother is giving me a dog." The phrase "a dog" in this case is that Accusative object.

The best way to internalize the individual cases is to work through several sentences and assign the parts of the sentence to the individual cases using the question method explained above.