Did you start studying German? Now, you probably already met “Accusative”. German cases often unsettle students as they do not fully understand their meaning. After reading this article, you will be a pro in terms of “Accusative” and ready for our upcoming adventure called “Dative”.
German grammar – the cases
German sentences are built up by four cases. Depending on your first language or the ones you have already studied, it will be easier or harder for you to understand the concept of German grammar. However, you should know that you cannot (!) run away from studying the four cases (4 Fälle) if you wish to accomplish a higher level than A1. Also, you should know that once you have understood their idea, you have already won half the battle.
In the last article –The Ultimate Guide to understanding the German Nominative! – I discussed the concept of the first German case Nominative. As a quick reminder: Its role is to describe the subject – somebody or something that does something in the sentence.
Now, when we want to start building sentences that are a little more complex and include a second person or object besides the mentioned subject, we need to find a way to express the relation the issue has with this object. Therefore we use Accusative, Dative, and Genitive in German. In this article, we will only focus on Accusative as the other two cases will be relevant in the following two pieces of this article series.
Recommended study materials on the topic:
A-Grammar: Practice German grammar German(incl. answers)
B-Grammar: Practice German grammar German (incl. answers)
German self-study book for A1-B1 (incl. answers)
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The concept of Accusative
To understand when to use Accusative (Akkusativ), you need tointernalize the following idea:
An accusative object is always a direct object.
Therefore:
It never does something itself, but moreover, something is done with it by the subject.
An example of Accusative:
As you can see, the man is doing something with the coffee – he drinks it. Therefore the coffee becomes the direct object. As we learned in the first article of this series, you can ask for Nominativ by using “who” (wer). For Accusative, you can ask “whom” (wen). Also, in English, one would not ask, “Whom does the man drink?” as he drinks coffee, and therefore one would ask, “what.” Accordingly, in classical German Grammar, one can ask “was” (what) to find your subject, but unfortunately, you can also use “was” to find out the nominative case. While working as a German online teacher, I realized this is very confusing and will become even worse when adding Dative. As a result, I suggest using “wen” at the beginning for every Accusative object until you are more confident and, therefore, will not get lost within the cases.
For our example above, the question would be: Wen (was) trinkt der Mann?
And the answer would be: den Kaffee
Accusative verbs
Besides, there are several verbs which always ask for an Accusative object for instance: lieben, fragen, essen, kaufen, kennen, lernen, mögen, machen, möchten, kosten or hängen, legen, stellen, setzen.
Accusative prepositions
Above all, another possibility to realize that you need to use the Accusative case is prepositions. When you use the following prepositions, you can be 100 % sure you will have to use Accusative: bis, durch, für, gegen, ohne or um.
Genders in Accusative
As you have already learned, the German language offers its speakers three genders: male, female, and neuter, which all can be the Accusative object of your sentence. As you might have already realized, there are “den” and “einen” which somehow smuggled themselves into the story. Well, the male gender (der, ein) changes and becomes “den” and, accordingly “einen” which is the proper way to express the direct male object in a German sentence. In contrast, all the other genders stay as you already know them from Nominative. Remember: The “n” describes the male gender throughout the whole case – also, you ask “wen”to aks for the object.
