3 Cases - Introduction

In English, generally the subject of the verb appears before the verb, the object appears after the verb.

Subject + verb + direct object.
e.g. The boy loves his dog.

This sentence structure can be used in German, and often is used. However, German also uses the case form to indicate whether a given word or phrase is a subject, direct object, or has some other relationship to the verb.

There are four cases in German.

Nominative: used for the subject of the sentence
Accusative: used for the direct object of the verb
Genitive
Dative

Use the correct case forms for a word is called declining. We will consider “declining” down to only the nominative and accusative at this time.

For most nouns, declining to the nominative and accusative is simple. There is no difference in the forms: the same form is used for both the nominative and the accusative. The relatively few exceptions will be explained later.

For nouns in the masculine gender, the case of the definite article can be used to distinguish between nominative and accusative, since there is a difference in the form of the definite article in these two cases: the nominative masculine singular is der, and the accusative masculine singular is den.

Because German uses cases, the same meaning can be conveyed even if the word order is changed.

Der Junge liebt den Hund. The boy loves the dog.
Den Hund liebt der Junge. The boy loves the dog.

So, you can see that it is necessary for you to learn the cases. Here is a table of the nominative and accusative definite articles for you to learn.

Definite Articles
	Masc.	Fem.	Neut.	All Plurals
Nominative	der	die	das	die
Accusative	den	die	das	die

The nominative and accusative cases are quite simple to understand: they generally represent the subject and direct object of the verb, respectively.

Den Mantel trägt der Mann. The man takes the coat.
Die Frau liest das Buch. The woman reads the book.

In these sentences, der Mann and die Frau are subjects (nominative case), and den Mantel and das Buch are direct objects (accusative case).

However, please note that whereas you can establish the case of both the subject and the object in the first sentence from the case of the definite articles, you cannot do this in the second sentence. This is because the definite articles for both feminine and neuter nouns do not distinguish between nominative and accusative cases. In this case, you can establish the subject and object in this second sentence from the word order, since the subject always appears before the object if inversion of the order would be misleading.

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