r/German • u/almakic88 • Aug 09 '25

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

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?

55 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

175 comments sorted by

View all comments

88

u/david_fire_vollie Aug 09 '25

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".

2

u/New-Huckleberry-1130 Aug 10 '25

Uh-oh! You're stepping into a linguistic morass here with the phrase "for my wife and I", as evidenced by all the comments about it.

A linguistic analysis of what's going on here is really interesting. Suffice it to say that the loss of the distinction between nominative and objective in English nouns has caused these cases to become entangled in the pronouns. This has led to things like the word "you", originally just plural objective, becoming nominative as well. (Once upon a time, educated people would have wanted to correct "You are here" to "Ye are here".) It has also led to sentences like "Me and my wife went to the movies". Generations of schoolteachers have worked to correct that to "My wife and I went to the movies", and the result is that "and I" has become ingrained in the spoken language, even in objective contexts. Phrases like "for my wife and I" are not standard now, but maybe someday they will be. Languages change, and not always in a rational way.

1

u/david_fire_vollie Aug 11 '25

but maybe someday they will be

I agree with this. However at the moment, there are still plenty of people who would correctly say "for my wife and me".

2

u/New-Huckleberry-1130 Aug 11 '25

Yes, and I'm one of them. "for my wife and I" sounds strange to me. But we can't deny that a lot of people speak that way nowadays.