Phew, a last-minute rescue for our teacher! – Teacher watches student.ĭen Schüler beobachtet der Lehrer beim Nasebohren. Who is watching who? Oh no, is the teacher being watched and has lost all his authority, forever? Luckily for the teacher, we have the cases and can state:ĭer Lehrer beobachtet den Schüler beim Nasebohren. – The teacher watches the student?ĭer Schüler beobachtet *der Lehrer beim Nasebohren. In this sentence the student suffers the action of being watched (and laughed at, probably).īut just imagine this case: The teacher was male too, we didn’t have the different cases in German, but still a flexible word order.ĭer Lehrer beobachtet *der Schüler beim Nasebohren. – The teacher watches her student picking his nose Here, meinen Partner (my partner) is affected by the action-he feels a very humid and big imprint of my lips on his cheek.ĭie Lehrerin beoachtet ihren Schüler beim Nasebohren. Direct in this case means the object, which can be a person or a thing, is directly affected by the action of the sentence. For now, the direct object is interesting for us. This extra information can be given as a direct or an indirect object. While in our first exemplary phrases I didn’t have to give you any extra information, but I could have done it, there are certain verbs that demand extra information. That said, we can move our attention to the part that actually can be explained. Whereas the verb demanding a certain case has some logic in it, there is none to (most of) the prepositions. To reassure you, there are only a few verbs that pull that little stunt and their meaning is close to “to be”: werden (to become) and bleiben (to stay).įirst of all, let me tell you here, that cases other than the nominative can be demanded mostly by two different kinds of words: verbs and prepositions. You’d think: “Easy peasy, first one is the subject, second one the object” But no, the verb “to be” is the verbal form for an equation: “Ich=Eichhörnchen” That’s why, the “Eichhörnchen” is a nominative, too. Ich bin ein Eichhörnchen – I’m a squirrel. So far so good, but there is a little tricky verb, a usual suspect for doing crazy grammar stuff actually, the verb sein (to be). …oops, too much chocolate…Īnd here it is der Stuhl (the chair) that does the breaking down (me, I might only burst at some point). …and I don’t have to tell the whole world that it is tons of chocolate.ĭer Stuhl bricht zusammen. That is the person or the thing that does the action the verb is talking about: The nominative is reserved for the subject. If you look for me, you’ll find a little monster between the pages stuffing its face with ice-cream…no, wait…that’s somewhere else…you’ll find ich and so on. If you open it and look for champagne, you’ll find der Champagner. Let’s start with the most basic case: The nominative is the case you’ll find in your friendly dictionary. The Nominative – The factory setting of each word – This beautiful cake here I’m going to eat now.Įven though it might be quite clear here, who is eating who, there are cases where it is not that obvious and we need the articles as the case marker to tell us what is the subject and what is the object. That is why, you could start your sentence with an object, for example:ĭiesen schönen Kuchen hier werde ich jetzt essen. This is where the attention goes to, so, everyone (in this case, every component) wants its five minutes of fame. The first position is the spotlight of a sentence. In German, the subject doesn’t necessarily have to come first in a sentence. But that is just the point: after the subject. “In English the verb also comes second, after the subject.” you might yawn. It comes in the second position of a sentence. The only thing that stands as solid as the bouncer in Berghain, is the verb. Start learning German casesĪ basic information we need to know before we start the fun, is that Germans …I mean German sentences and their word order are pretty flexible. Wouldn’t it be so much easier, if they just had the as the English or we could even go for two articles, masculine and feminine, but the extra neutral one and the four different cases really is quite decadent.Ĭhampagne, anyone? Well actually, you should really put the champagne in the fridge now, so that once you’ve read this blog post you can finally drink it whilst understanding the German cases. Without getting anywhere near understanding why the hell Germans do that crazy thing to their articles and pronouns. What else to do with your evening than struggle with German cases? Again.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |