While it may seem daunting at first, and there’s no guarantee you won’t mess up in the initial stages, if you apply yourself you’ll master the dative in just a few weeks. German isn’t my native language and after some regular practice I even started to notice when people were using an accusative when it should have been a dative, especially in print. It’s confusing stuff, but thankfully there’s some good news: you can learn all this pretty quickly. The next question is “who or what is the key going to?” and that gives us the indirect object, meaning we place the man in the dative. If we ask the question “who or what is given?” it’s clear it’s the key and thus it gets the accusative. If you just go by your gut, you may be tempted to think that the direct object is the man, but it’s not. The short version is that the accusative is on the receiving end of a verb, so in the next example the man is the object and thus in the accusative. That’s not only because you want to come across as clever and educated if you make a mistake in the sentence above you could end up giving a man to the key! Dative vs accusativeīecause we don’t really distinguish in English between the direct and indirect object, knowing when to choose the accusative and when the dative can be tricky. The upshot is that to make a grammatically correct sentence in German you need to do a little more than you do in English. So we can tell the boy is the subject of the sentence as his article is der, while the key is the accusative because of the article den.Īs the man is given something, he gets the dative article dem. In the English version of that sentence, all the nouns are the same in German, though, the articles changed to reflect their corresponding nouns’ function in the sentence.

Learning german grammar rules