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Ennui wrote

What changes grammatically/syntactically (besides the obvious meaning change) in a German sentence with a direct object besides the masculine gender pronouns? And based on your example, it looks like in the dative case das --> dem. What changes with the dative case?

In your examples for prepositions, is the verb determining the meaning (e.g. 'gehen' being active and 'sein' being less active) or is one meant to infer the meaning from the change from das --> dem? Also, you said that "a few" use both cases---do some prepositions have set cases, meaning that the case is actually dependent on the preposition itself and not surrounding information?

Tut mir leid. Meine Professorin sagt, ich soll später dies lernen, obwohl ich anders denke.

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Basil wrote

So I'm not quite sure what you're asking with the first one but I'll still try to answer it. The most important change when a noun becomes accusative (for the direct object or otherwise) is that the article preceding it also becomes accusative. So if it's masculine, der becomes den, ein becomes einen. For neuter, das and ein are both the nominative and accusative articles. For both feminine and plural, they use die for both nominative and accusative, and for feminine eine is both nominative and accusative, with no plural form of ein existing. This is the best way to tell case, but it's not as necessary for nominative and accusative because you'll learn to pick up which is which from context. There aren't really any other major changes with the accusative, but with a direct object it will typically come after the main verb.

With the dative case, der and das become dem, the feminine form of die becomes der, the plural form of die becomes den. Ein for both neuter and masculine becomes einem, and eine (feminine) becomes einer. These articles are basically something you need to memorize for German, 16 combinations each for Der and Ein, just because they will be the main indicator or case.

for my examples it's a mixture of both. The change in case (from das to dem) will never fail you, but usually you can figure it out from the verb too. With verbs that don't imply motion, for example sein, schlafen, tragen, etc., you can be pretty sure that it will take the dative meaning, i.e. that it will mean "in the house" rather than "into the house," simply because it doesn't make sense "schlafen in das Kino" to sleep into the cinema, but it makes sense if its "schlafen in dem Kino," to sleep in the cinema.

Most prepositions do have set cases, though now that I think of it the ones that are used most often are the two-way ones. An example of a few that don't are gegen, against, and durch, through, both of which take the accusative case and will never take the dative. There are also some that take only the dative and never the accusative, for example zu, meaning to, and mit, with.

Es geht. Aber du sollst benutzen mehr als nur mich, weil ich kein Lehrer bin. I ch hoffe nur, dass ich habe dich nicht verwechselt.

Really, you seem more than good enough at German for the level you're at. I wouldn't worry too much, you'll get more used to it and hopefully your professor can teach you better than I can. Good luck on your test tomorrow!

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