The Accusative

Hello, this is Laura and this is German GrammarPod. This our second podcast about cases, and today weve reached the accusative case. Cases are simply another way of showing what role a word plays in a sentence, like word order does in English. So, to recap, the nominative case was the case which showed the person or thing doing the action (what in English grammar wed called the subject). The accusative, on the other hand, is the case which shows which noun the action is being done to (or what English grammar calls the direct object). So if we have the sentence Peter ate a shark, or as it is in German, Peter hat einen Hai gegessen, Peter, being the one who ate the shark, is in the nominative, and the shark, which had the eating done to it is in the accusative. As I said last time, so long as there is a marker that shows which word is nominative or which is accusative you can switch the word order round, and it will still be the word in the accusative that has the action done to it and the word in the nominative that does the action. As I also said last time, the simplest sentences generally take the form: NOMINATIVE, VERB, ACCUSATIVE, for instance: Ich trinke den Wein (I drink the wine) Markus liebt mich (Markus loves me) or Peter hat einen Bruder (Peter has a brother) This all seems very logical, albeit something you have to make an extra effort to remember. But now comes the strange bit: the only places you can tell the difference between a nominative and an accusative are in the masculine singular and in some personal pronouns - thats words like I and me. All the rest - the feminine, the neuter and the plural stay exactly the same as the nominative. So if youre trying to spot the accusative in the sentence, youre mainly looking for masculine nouns and pronouns to give you the clues. Dont forget that seeing a masculine noun or pronoun in a case other than the accusative also gives you a clue - that this is not the one youre looking for for the accusative. The accusative of the masculine singular is very simple to spot or produce. It always ends in -en.

Sometimes you add that onto the end of the nominative form, so ein becomes einen, kein becomes keinen and mein becomes meinen. And sometimes you replace the ending with an -en, so der becomes den and dieser becomes diesen. Its even simpler on adjectives, so for example alte and alter, the two forms that are used in the nominative depending on the determiner both become alten; rote and roter become roten. In fact so long as they stand before a noun, accusative masculine adjectives always end in an -en regardless of the determiner they follow and regardless of whether theres a determiner there at all. So you get: einen alten Mann den alten Mann and simply alten Mann With personal pronouns, the key ones to remember when you first start out learning German are mich which is the accusative of ich and dich which is the accusative of du. For more advanced learners, here are the rest of them: er becomes ihn sie (meaning she or it) stays as sie es stays as es wir becomes uns Sie (the singular and plural formal form of you) stays as Sie ihr (the informal plural form of you) becomes euch and sie (meaning they) stays as sie. So to sum up, sie always stays as sie in the accusative whether its being used to mean she or it, you formal or they. Es too stays the same, but everything else changes. At the moment, it probably sounds a lot like mich is used in German precisely where me is used in English. But this isnt quite the case. Some places where wed say me in English are actually indirect objects and these take the dative in German, which well be coming onto next time. You have to be a bit careful in German too, as some verbs which in English you might reasonably assume take a direct object and therefore an accusative in German, in German take the dative instead. But these only make up a very small proportion of German verbs and well cover them in the podcast on the dative. Well also wait for that podcast to cover verbs that can take both an accusative and a dative. Back on the accusative, its worth noting that usually a verb only takes one accusative (unless youre talking about a list, such as Ich kaufe einen Schokoriegel, eine Zeitung und eine Flasche Mineralwasser. Here all the things on the list are in the accusative, and in fact, unless there are prepositions involved in your list, which can change things, items in lists always all take the same case as each other, and that case is the same one as if youd just mentioned one of the list items in the sentence).

There are a few notable exceptions to this, however, where certain verbs take two accusatives and which those of you at a fairly advanced stage might want to commit to memory, but people at a beginner or intermediate stage neednt worry about. These are the verbs kosten (to cost), lehren (to teach), angehen (to concern) and fragen (to ask). Of the nouns in the accusative case, the first one shows the target or direction of the action and the second gives you the object by which the target of the action is affected. So, for example for kosten, you can say: Der Wein hat meinen Vater 10 gekostet where der Wein (the wine) is in the nominative and is the subject of the sentence, meinenVater (my father) is in the accusative and is the person at whom the cost is directed and 10 (ten euros), also in the accusative, is the cost that my father has had to pay. My other examples are: Frau Schmidt hat mich Deutsch gelehrt. Mrs Schmidt taught me German. Das geht mich nichts an That doesnt concern me (literally: that concerns me nothing) and Haben Sie ihn etwas gefragt? Did you ask him something? This is pretty unusual. In the first two in particular, kosten and lehren, if you followed how most German verbs tend to work, youd expect the person who paid the cost and the person who was taught to be in the dative. Indeed, some colloquial German uses that form. But Duden, the German dictionary which defines correct German usage, says that you should use the accusative here and the Germans I asked said the same, so for extra points in advanced exams and to impress your German teacher, these should be used with two accusatives. But, a word of warning, the verb lehren for to teach is falling out of usage. The verb that is now commonly used is beibringen, which works using the more usual pattern of a dative and an accusative, so youd actually say Frau Schmidt hat mir Deutsch beigebracht. However, all this doesnt mean that when youre not using kosten, lehren, fragen or angehen youre limited to one accusative per sentence. The accusative also turns up floating around in sentences, for instance in greetings, such as Guten Morgen or Gute Nacht or wishes such as Gute Reise, Gute Besserung or Besten Dank. The accusative is also the case that you use to express lengths of time or points in time in a sentence. So, if an expression of time such as today or the whole day or next year was sitting in your sentence, then it should be in the accusative too. For instance: Es hat den ganzen Tag geregnet. Ich war einen Monat in Berlin. or Ich sah sie heute. Another place you use the accusative is after certain prepositions. Im just going to cover that briefly now as well be coming back to that when we do prepositions. A preposition is a word like in, on, for, with, till or from. In English, you just put a noun or noun phrase after them and youre done, so I drink my coffee without milk, or The birthday card was for my best friend. In German,

though, the noun or the noun phrase has to be in the right case for the preposition. In case you were wondering, a noun phrase means the noun together with the words that modify it - the determiners and adjectives. So friend is noun and my bald, but handsome friend is a noun phrase. Anyhow, back on prepositions: Some of the most common prepositions that take the accusative are: bis which means till or until fr which means for ohne which means without durch which means through or throughout gegen which often means against, but can have other translations in English, depending on how it is used and um which doesnt correspond particularly neatly to any specific English preposition, but which can mean round or about, or a few other things in specific different contexts. When you use one of these prepositions, the noun or noun phrase that comes after it has to be in the accusative. Prepositions are good because they override all other considerations as to what case a word should be in.. If you know what case a preposition takes, then you know what case the noun or noun phrase that comes after it has to be. But, theres a catch. Some German prepositions can take either an accusative or a dative. Whether they take an accusative or a dative depends on whether theyre expressing movement from one place to another or whether theyre expressing something remaining in the same place or area. Its the difference between putting the cat on the mat (the accusative) and the cat sitting on the mat (the dative). Again, when we come back to prepositions, Ill go back into that in more detail, as it takes most people a while to get their heads around it. The prepositions that can take either the accusative or the dative are: an which means on as in on the side of, auf which means on as in on top of, entlang which means along, hinter which means behind, in which means in, neben which means next to, ber which means over or above, unter which means under vor which means in front of or before and zwischen which means between

Thats it for German GrammarPod this time. Next time well be doing the dative, so until then, goodbye.