The Cases:

Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive

German II

THE PRINCIPLE OF CASE

Case refers to the function of the noun (or pronoun) within a sentence. In other words, case marks the relationship of a noun to the other words in the sentence.

German has 4 cases: the Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive case. Case is marked by the form of the article and the ending (if any) on the noun. Below is a chart of the definite article.

	MASC	NEUT	FEM	PLURAL
NOM	der	das	die	die
ACC	den	das	die	die
DAT	dem	dem	der	den
GEN	des	des	der	der

The sentence The woman sees the man can be translated:

Die Frau sieht den Mann.

Den Mann sieht die Frau.

Although the first version would be more common, both versions are possible and mean the same thing because the article, and not word order, marks grammatical case.