It has been my experience in all my years as a German teacher, that most students who have not trained with me from the beginning are thoroughly confused about Akkusativ and Dativ. - They just know one thing: it is a major pain in the you know what.
Exacerbation abounds, some even gave up heeding any rules regarding this issue altogether, thereby abbandoning any chance of ever sounding close to anything resembling a native speaker.
So I'd like to zoom out and (re)visit what we are actually dealing with here. Who are you, Dativ and Akkusativ other than the weird uncles, everybody else in Western Europe sent packing round about the time they got rid of Latin?
The short answer: Dativ and Akkusativ are names for nouns in the object position of a sentence. The name for the subject position is "Nominativ".
The long answer:
As all students of languages should know: every sentence has a subject and a verb. In addition, in more complicated sentences there is at least one object. Both subject and object(s) are either nouns or pronouns.
The subject is the nouns which decides how the verb ends (conjugates). There can only be one.
Objects are the recipient of the subject's action. Often in a wider sense. "Peter visits Paula" - Peter is the subject, Paula is "being visited" i.e. the recipient of the action. This is a simple clear senence. = in German: Peter besucht Paula. No complication.
But ofcourse not all sentences are so conveniently simple.
The teacher gives a new pen to the student. Teacher = subject, because he contols the verb (giveS), that means: pen and student = objects.
In English and in other continental European languages nouns don't change form, be they in the subject or object position. Only personal pronouns do. - Compare: "i'm talking to he" vs "I'm talking to him".
But in German ALL nouns and pronouns in an object position change, ALL the time - and herein lies the challenge.
However, in doing so they do not change the noun itself (if we disregard the n-declensions for a minute, a B-level issue); instead they alter the words attached to the object-noun: the articles (definitive, indefinitive and negative), possessiv pronouns (mein, dein etc) and adjectives. And ofcourse, if the object is a personal pronoun, the forms change completely, as they do in English: I - me, he - him, they - them etc.
So the above example in correct German goes as follows:
Der Lehrer gibt dem Schüler einen neuen Stift.
So why do we not say "Der Lehrer gibt der Schüler ein neu Stift"?
Because the objects (Stift and Schüler) must adjust their articles (and all other words which may accompany them, like adjectives or possessiv pronouns). They can NOT remain in the same form they would take in the Nominativ, i.e. the subject position.
der Lehrer = subject = Nominativ (subject position; controls the verb, hence "gibt" from "geben" and not any other form)
der Schüler = object,
der Stift / ein Stift = object.
der = article which is changing when attached to a noun in the object position
neu = adjective which is adopting an ending when preceeding a noun and which is changing when the noun is in the object position
"der Schüler" is in the Dativ position. Therefore "der" changes to "dem"
"der Stift" is in the Akkusativ position. Therefore "der" changes to "den".
neuen = Akkusativ declension of "neu"
How these adjustments (declensions) are made and how we idenify which object is in the Dativ or Akkusativ in the first place, will be explained in my next post.
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