Now how exactly can we use dative pronouns? You can even now start memorizing all of them. You now understand that German dative pronouns function differently from nominative (<– of course) AND accusative (<– not quite so self-evident for an English-speaker). I’ve circled the pronouns that you saw in our example sentence ( bolded)ĭer Mann gibt der Frau das Geld (The man gives the woman the money) To get you started off on this German-learning adventure, check out these German nominative, accusative, AND dative personal pronouns side-by-side:
#Dative german grammar how to
So, in English we have just the one set of pronouns (called ‘object pronouns’) that covers both the accusative & dative cases (combined together & called the objective case in English).īut, to speak German, we have to learn how to make the distinction between accusative & dative - including between accusative & dative pronouns, which is usually pretty tricky at first. You can see this difference between English & German laid out in this graphic: German, however, uses TWO DIFFERENT groups of pronouns: accusative (‘direct object’) pronouns and dative (‘indirect object’ pronouns). This core difference between German & English impacts a lot of grammar, including pronouns.Įnglish has THE SAME pronouns ( me, you, him, her, it, us, you, them that you saw above) that get used for BOTH the accusative AND dative cases. Normally, English doesn’t distinguish between accusative and dative. The man gave the woman the money), we saw one of the very few instances in English when we have distinctly accusative and dative objects.
Whatever noun (or pronoun) is the subject of your sentence goes into that slot (usually the very first word in the sentence!), for example:Īll of the bolded pronouns in the examples above are nominative pronouns that would go into the nominative ‘slot’ just like our driver, Frank. The most important slot - that gets filled up first - is the nominative. Think of each of these sentences ^^ as having ‘slots’ that get filled up with nouns. They eat scrambled eggs every morning - Sie essen jeden morgen Rühreier. You (all) look exhausted - Ihr seht erschöpft aus. We go on vacation next week - Wir gehen nächste Woche in den Urlaub. It is really hot outside - Es ist draußen sehr heiß. These are the pronouns that are used to talk about the subject of the sentence, e.g. Nominative pronouns, or ‘subject pronouns’, have a direct 1-to-1 German-English relationship:
You will have a WHOLE WORLD of phrases open up to you once you can use dative pronouns. German Dative Pronouns: Your Essential Guideĭrumroll, please! Learning dative pronouns is an exciting event, like a graduation in your German-learning journey!