The Dative Case
If you've been following Matteo's World of German over the past couple of weeks, you may be, at the very least, familiar with the four cases used in German. These are the nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. So far, we've gone over the nominative and the accusative. This time, we'll look at the third of the German cases, the dative.
The Dative case is used for the indirect object of a sentence, the indirect object being the person or thing to or for whom something is done.
For example:
Ich habe meiner Freundin eine E-mail geschickt.
In this example, it is I who is sending my girlfriend an e-mail. The best way to look at this is by breaking the sentence down into who, what, and to whom or what the thing is being done for.
Before we go ahead and look at another example, it's worth noting the four dative verbs:
danken to thank
folgen to follow
glauben to believe
helfen to help
Here's another example:
Ich dankte meiner Oma für das Geschenk.
Remembering the who, what, and to whom/what process, what do you think makes up the dative?
Who = ich
What = das Geschenk
To whom = meiner Oma
So, we know the verb dankte is a past participle for thank, therefore Oma, which is a feminine verb, would instead use the masculine der as the article. Because we are referring to my grandma, meiner is used. The present is the what.
In actual fact, the dative sentence would usually follow the who-to whom/what-what pattern.
Makes sense, right?
You're right, it doesn't. But it does become easier with time. We'll put more examples in play at a later time, and there will be opportunities to revisit the four cases, dative included!
Now, time for an articles cheat sheet!
I hope you've enjoyed learning another German case with me. As always, do try to create your own examples and keep practicing while using the cheat sheets provided. We have just one more left, and that's the Genitive.
But we'll leave that for next time.
Tschüss!
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