When do you use the different cases?

German is split into four different cases: the nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Each case indicates something about the sentence, which can be established by asking certain questions. Nominative: who is the person doing the verb? Accusative, who or what is being directly impacted by the verb? Dative, is there someone receiving the object, or something that is the indirect object of the verb? Genitive, does the object belong to someone? Not all sentences use all the cases, but to show how they work we will take an example sentence which does. The sentence is: "Ich gebe dir das Hemd meiner Frau" (I'm giving you my wife's shirt). So to find the nominative, we need to ask: who is the person doing the verb? Our verb is to give, so who is the person giving something? It is me, I am giving something (Ich). Next, to find the accusative, we must ask: who or what is directly impacted by the verb? So who or what is being given? In this case, this is the shirt (das Hemd), or more precisely the wife's shirt (das Hemd meiner Frau). Now, to find the dative we need to ask if someone is receiving the object? Or, in this case, who is being given the wife's shirt? You are (dir). So this is our dative. Finally, to find our genitive we need to ask: does the object belongs to someone? The object is the shirt, does it belong to someone? Yes it does, it belongs to my wife (meine Frau), this is indicated by adding an 'r' to 'meine Frau' similarly to adding an " 's " to my wife's shirt in English. Therefore to summarise there are four cases, the most common are the nominative and accusative, as most sentences have a verb and an object, however the dative and genitive are also commonly used. To know when to use them, one can ask themselves certain questions. who is the person doing the verb? (nominative)who or what's being directly impacted by this verb? (accusative)is there someone receiving the object, or something that is the indirect object of the verb? (dative)And finally, does the object of the verb belong to someone? (genitive)