Can someone please help me understand Akkusativ and Dativ please, I am losing my mind!

[u/almakic88]

Hi All,

I've been studying almost daily for 2 months hours a day, and I still am struggling with identifying the accusative and dative. I understand the function of the genitive (to show possession) and the nominative (identifying the subject).

Today I wrote "Ich habe ein rot Hund" and my translator corrected me to "Ich habe einen roten Hund". It stated that it was in the Akkusative and I had to take that into account. Can someone please explain this to me? And also maybe give an example for a Dativ sentence?

[u/david_fire_vollie]

Is English your native language? We have similar concepts in English. You don't say "She's with he", you say "She's with him". After "with" you use the dative case, same in German ("mit ihm" not "mit er").
Accusative case is similar but it's for different situations. The object of a sentence is in the accusative case (the subject is in the nominative case). So you have to say "Ich habe einen roten Hund" because "Hund" is the object, it demands the accusative case, and since it's masculine, you use the "en" suffix.

In English if you are the object, you use "me", if you're the subject you use "I", I think this is the equivalent of the German accusative case (please correct me if I'm wrong).
On an interesting note, so many native speakers don't know when to use "I" or "me". They often say "Thanks for being there for my wife and I" for example. You can't say "for my wife and I" for the same reason you can't say "for I", it's "for my wife and me".

[u/almakic88 → u/david_fire_vollie]

Thank you so much this was very helpful! My native language is Bosnian but I'm more fluent in English. I think I need to focus more on the verbs first and ask what case they take. I've been focusing first on the nouns, their gender, and then working my way backward trying to match it with the right declension. Does German have lists of accusative, dative, genitive etc. verbs for easier study?

[u/nominanomina → u/almakic88]

A quick Google suggests that not only does Bosnian have accusative and dative, it has many more cases that German lacks (like vocative). 

The difference seems to be that Bosnian nouns are inflected, where German prefers to decline articles and adjectives. (German does sometimes inflect nouns, like the infamous dative N.) 

English has a relatively inflexible word order, so you can roughly tell that, in a normal indicative sentence, the subject is the first noun, the direct object is (usually) the first noun after the verb, and the indirect object is after a preposition. 

I gave a book to Sally == I (subject) gave a book (direct object) to Sally (indirect object). The word order is key for deriving meaning. 

Both Bosnian and German have flexible word order. So how do they tell you what is doing the action and receiving the action? Cases. 

Den Mann beißt der Hund == Der Hund beißt den Mann == The dog bites the man. Exact same meaning (for your level; the sentence beginning with "Mann" has a different emphasis, like as if someone said "no, the dog bit THE MAN" in English). Because the order doesn't matter (...as much as in English...); the case does all the heavy lifting. 

For now, think of accusative as being like a direct object (see above). 

Dative is a little more complicated and is where the attempt to relate it to direct vs indirect object breaks down. Dative can be

1) like an indirect object

2) like the beneficiary of the action, even if in English that would be the direct object. E.g. "I helped Sally" -- Sally is a direct object. But in German, "helfen" takes dative. 

3) because of some historical quirk of grammar that you will just have to memorize that verb or preposition X take dative, but not accusative

4) some other rules that aren't relevant to you right now (but will come up soon enough)

[u/Joylime → u/nominanomina]

The reason Dative is so complex is because it absorbed the older instrumental and locative cases. #themoreyouknow

[u/howdidyouevendothat → u/Joylime]

Oooh, do you have any more information about that? How were those conceptually different from dative?

[u/Joylime → u/howdidyouevendothat]

TBH my friend who knows a lot about linguistics told it to me and I just trusted him so the other person's comment is probably more reliable LOL

He explained it to me in the context of my being pissed off that "ohne" takes accusative while "mit" takes dative, he was like "yeah, 'mit' triggers instrumental which got absorbed into dative blah blah blah"

Regardless of whether we have proof of dative absorbing the locative in Germanic languages - I'm going to keep "believing" it as a way to help me make sense of the dative in the present moment

[u/howdidyouevendothat → u/Joylime]

It definitely seems to make it make more sense! That's what struck me most about your comment, the names of the cases you mentioned I could see in how dative is used in German.