What is the ablative case?

Latin is very clever. It's much more economical than English and can get across a lot of meaning in much fewer words. A good example of this is the ablative case, which is probably the strangest grammatical case, but maybe the most interesting. Basically, whereas in English we use little words called prepositions to make sense of sentences, e.g. 'to', 'by', 'from', 'with', Latin does the same thing just by changing the ending. You might have seen this in other cases, too, like the dative case. Generally, it helps to think of the ablative case as the case of "use". So, animus means 'the mind'. While the ablative animo means 'with the mind', or 'by the mind' - it's up to you how to translate it best in the sentence, but usually the context will make it pretty obvious!There's also a really cool use of the ablative case called the 'ablative absolute'. It's a favourite of the examiners, but not that hard. This is when a noun and an agreeing verb participle are put into the ablative case in order to explain what was happening at the same time as the main sentence. Here's a good example: ambulo means 'I am walking'. sol lucens means 'shining sun'. We can fit these two things together by putting sol lucens into the ablative case! So the sentence would be ambulo sole lucente, which means 'I am walking while the sun shines'.With the ablative case, Latin can say in three words what English says in seven!