tryna learn german and its saying the difference between eine or ein and einen is the accusative case and idk wtf that means and when to use it so pls what does this mean
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also if anyone here knows German then when and why is den and dem used instead of der die and das
This is the funny thing. My language has acusative case but its nearly impossible to explain it in English in a way that it makes sense.
Basically its a change in certain words (nouns, ajdectives, pronouns) in a specific cases. English used to have them too, one of the few remaning ones are I and ME. You say “I see two red doors” but “you see me”. Acusative cases is used for object (the language category) connected to a verb. E.g. you always use “see” with something, that something that you see is acusative.
In German you often use acusative in connection to specific prepositions, such as bis, durch, ohne, durch, für etc.
A noun is a word that means “a thing” like “Apple” and “Peter”.
In English where a noun appears in a sentence can help you understand if the noun is *doing something* or *having something done to it*.
For example “Peter ate the apple” vs “The apple ate Peter” are clearly very different sentences even though the words “Peter” and “Apple” are the same, their *place* in the sentence controls their meaning.
Sometimes in English we will change the spelling or “case” of the noun we use depending how it’s used in a sentence for example.
“He gave it to me” vs. “I gave it to him”. In this example both he and him, and me and I refer to the same people, but we use different words because of how they function in the sentence. But English still relies on word order very strongly so “Him gave it to I” wouldn’t be easily understandable to an English speaker. We wouldn’t know whether to use the word order, or the form of the word to control who is acting and who being acted upon.
In these examples “He” is the *nominitive case* of a noun and “him” is the *accusative case*.
Nominative is the noun doing an action, accusative is the noun that’s being acted upon.
*Nominative* ate the *accusative.*
*Nominative* jumped over the *accusative.*
*Nominative* clearly needs to understand *accusative* better before trying to learn a new noun.
In English other than pronouns we don’t (generally) modify a noun if it’s nominative or accusative, we rely on word order, but in German they do modify the noun per your eine/ein/einen example.
In fact in German a sentence “Him gave it to I” would be understandable because they are so much more fixated on the case than the word order.
The accusative case is a noun which receives the action of the verb.
“The man saw a car”.
There are two nouns, “man” and “car”. The man did the action. The car received the action.
The car is the accusative. In English they don’t really distinguish them when speaking, but other languages use special suffixes like Latin.
For instance: “the girl saw a girl”
In Latin, the first girl is “puella” and the girl who was seen is “puellam”.
You know the difference between I and me? I is the nominative pronoun, used to indicate the subject of a sentence. (I want bread => I am the one who is doing the wanting). Me is the oblique pronoun, used to indicate the object of a sentence. (They hate me => I am the one who is being hated). I said oblique up there: in English oblique is equivalent to the German accusative and dative cases combined. Accusative refers to the direct object of a sentence, so in sentences like “She gave me a slice of pizza”, ‘me’ is the ~~direct~~ indirect object while ‘a slice of pizza’ is the ~~indirect~~ direct object. In German ‘me’ would be the dative pronoun ‘mir’ while ‘a slice of pizza’ would have the accusative article (I don’t know what gender a slice of pizza has, sorry) A heuristic would be to mentally replace the noun phrase with the third-person pronoun- if it sounds right to use he or she, it’s the subject and should take the nominative case. If him or her sounds right it’s an object, and will take either the accusative or dative case.
Example sentence: The man gives a ball to the woman. | Der Mann gibt einen Ball der Frau.
**Nominative** – The nominative case is used for the subject in the sentence. It is the “default setting” of the cases so to say and answers the question “Wer?” or “who?”
Who gives the ball: The man | Der Mann
**Accusative** – The accusative case describes the direct object of a sentence. It answers to the question “Wen?” or “whom?” .
What does the man give: a ball | einen Ball
**Dative** – The dative case describes an indirect object that receives an action from the direct object in the accusative case or the subject. The dative case gives you more information about an action that took place. It talks about the recipient. The question for the dative case in German would be “Wem?” or “to whom?”
To whom does the man give the ball: to the woman | der Frau
Source upon which I expanded: [https://blog.lingoda.com/en/accusative-dative-german/](https://blog.lingoda.com/en/accusative-dative-german/)
Further reading: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dative_case#German](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dative_case#German)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusative_case#German](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusative_case#German)
In English grammar a noun is usually either the subject or the object of a sentence. The subject is the noun that is performing the action, the object is the noun that the action is being performed on. So in the sentence, “The man threw the ball,” the man is the subject; he is the one throwing the ball. The ball is the direct object because the ball is the object being thrown. If you understand the subject vs. object distinction it should be easy to tell if a noun should use the nominative case or the accusative case.
The challenging thing when learning German is learning the distinction between the accusative case (direct objects) and the dative case (indirect objects). This is a distinction that doesn’t exist in English afaik. This mostly comes down to memorization, as depending on which preposition is being used the object will take on either the dative or the accusative case. But for simple sentences with no prepositions, the noun that is receiving the action is in the accusative case.
What did the man want to eat? “The cake said the man!” Did the cake really say something? No, obviously the cake is the object of the verb “eat” and the man is the subject. In English we use “the” for both. German would use a different “the” for each. In this case the object gets “den” and the subject gets “der.” In English we usually do this by word order or by inserting a comma.
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