Nominativ und Akkusativ – The German Cases

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 Hallo! Guten Tag! 🙂

This post is about nominativ (nominative) and akkusativ (accusative) cases. These cases exist in English as well. Therefore, before jumping straight-away to German, let us understand what these cases mean in English.
What is nominative case?
Nominative case is taken by the sentence’s subject. For example, in sentence: “The man loves the dog.“, subject is the man. Therefore, “the man” takes the nominative case in this sentence.

What is accusative case?
A sentence’s object takes the accusative case. In sentence: “The man loves the dog.“, object is the dog.  Therefore, “the dog” takes the accusative case in this sentence.

The focus of a sentence is its subject. We really need to have a subject to talk about, right? Verb is generally conjugated according to the subject of the sentence. Second important thing in a sentence is its object. Sentences are mostly incomplete without its object. “The man loves.“ sounds so incomplete!
Now we know what nominative and accusative cases are. In German, in transition from nominative case to accusative case, a masculine object’s article changes from der to den, rest remains the same.
It’s all about the articles!
In German, articles are really the show stealer. Every noun is associated with an article – der (masculine), die (feminine) and das (neutral). You really need to be thorough with the articles in order to be familiar with such basic concept like nominativ und akkusativ. For example, in sentence:  “The man loves the dog.“, you need to know the articles of man and dog, besides, of course, lieben, and how is it conjugated with 3rd person singular. These posts might be helpful – Articles: der, die, das, Nomen: Singular und Plural and Personal Pronouns and Verb Conjugation.
Let’s jump to the rule now!

Nominativ: der Mann  |  die Frau  |  das Kind  |  die Kinder

Akkusativ: den Mann  |  die Frau  | das Kind  |  die Kinder

Notice that the only culprit is der Mann! 😀
Let us now see some examples. In the following examples, (N) implies nominative object and (A) implies accusative object:
  1. Der Mann (N) liebt den Hund (A) .
  2. Die Frau (N) liebt den Mann (A).
  3. Das Kind (N) liebt den Hund (A).
  4. Die Kinder (N) lieben den Hund (A).
  5. Der Mann (N) liebt die Frau (A).
  6. Der Mann (N) liebt das Kind (A).
  7. Der Mann (N) liebt die Kinder (A).
That’s all for this post. If you have any query, simply ask! 🙂
Auf Wiedersehen!

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