How to know Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive Verbs in German?

Is there a way or technique – don’t expect it to be accurate always – to know if a verb is of any of the types above or maybe it even belongs to more than 2 types? Any source on the internet or even a book recommendation would be helpful.

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Nominative- and genitive-verbs are few (Nom: sein, heißen, . / Gen: bedürfen. ). The real work is to learn acc. versus dat. That’s, I guess then the technique: memorize.

What @c.p. says. I’m sure this has been asked before, e.g. in german.stackexchange.com/questions/7145/…

I’ll be chastized for this again, but most transitive verbs come with an Akkusativ for the direct object (the object or person on which the action of the verb is being performed), with some exceptions, like helfen, danken, etc. which use Dativ for the direct object. Intransitive verbs don’t have a direct object, so they don’t matter. As c.p. said, verbs that are followed by a Nominativ or Genitiv are pretty rare and can easily be memorized.

4 Answers 4

Nominativ

The list of verbs, that need an object in nominative case is short. You can call this object a Nominativobjekt, but the more common term is Gleichsetzungsnominativ (nominative of equality).

Lisa scheint die Anführerin zu sein.
Lisa seems to be the leader.

Helmut gilt als Draufgänger.
Helmut is considered to be a daredevil.

Donald fühlt sich als der Herrscher der Welt.
Donald feels like the ruler of the world.

Das Paket entpuppte sich als eine Bombe.
The package turned out to be a bomb.

Unser Chef dünkt sich etwas Besseres.
Our boss thinks to be something better.

Genitiv

Genitive case often appears inside a nominal group as a possessive attribute of another noun, but there are also lots of other attributive usages of genitive case inside of nominal phrases. But you asked for verbs that need genitive objects, and there are no verbs inside of nominal phrases, so in most cases when you see a noun or a phrase in genitive case, this case is not ruled by a verb.

But there are still some verbs, that need a genitive object, and those verbs are rare too. Note, that many of them also can take a prepositional object instead of a genitive object.

Dieser Umstand bedarf einer Untersuchung.
This circumstance requires an investigation.

Diese Behauptung entbehrt jeder Grundlage.
This assertion lacks any basis.

Seine Aussagen ermangeln eines Beweises.
His statements lack proof.

Irene hat sich seiner Kinder angenommen.
Irene has taken care of his children.

Der Priester besann sich seines Gelöbnisses.
The priest remembered his vow.

Susanne erfreute sich des warmen Wetters.
Susanne enjoyed the warm weather.

Er erinnert sich deiner nicht mehr.
He does not remember you anymore.

Der Kanzler wurde seines Amtes enthoben. The chancellor was dismissed from office.

Der Rüpel wurde des Lokals verwiesen.
The ruffian was expelled from the pub.

In the next examples you will find groups of words, that might look like nominal phrases at first glance (like der Vater des Kindes = the father of the child), but in fact are a accusative object followed by a genitive object. All this examples occur when talking about crimes, so this special kind of genitive case is called genitivus criminis (genitive of crime). But it is not an attribute of any noun, but really an object that is ruled by the verb.

(jemanden) (einer Tat) verdächtigen

Der Ermittler verdächtigte den Tankwart des Mordes.
The investigator suspected the attendant of the murder.

The following verbs work exactly like verdächtigen:

• anklagen (to accuse)
• beschuldigen (to accuse)
• bezichtigen (to accuse)
• zeihen (outdated) (to accuse)
• überführen (to find guilty)

Dativ und Akkusativ

The rest of the more than 14,000 German verbs need either no object (altern, schlafen, wachsen, . ) or an object in dative (gehören, vertrauen, nützen, . ) or accusative case (haben, kaufen, fragen, . ) or even both (geben, schenken, wünschen, . ). There are also verbs that can take two accusative objects (lehren, nennen, kosten, . ). (Verbs that take a genitive and an accusative object are already listed above.)

Since this place here is not appropriate to list 14,000 verbs, i have to ask you to search for them in your own.

There are patterns that cover some verbs, but most verbs do fit in such patterns, so I think the best way is to do what all native speakers did: Learn for each verb which case it needs for its objects.

Як відрізнити Nominativ від Akkusativ

Summary: Nominative and accusative within a sentence

Nominative

The subject of a sentence is always in the nominative case.

Der Mann sucht seinen Schlüssel.

Occasionally, there is a second noun in the nominative in a sentence, for example with the verb sein:

Der Mann ist mein Freund.

Accusative

Many verbs need an object for the sentence to make sense. The object is usually in the accusative case.

Der Mann sucht seinen Schlüssel.
Nico öffnet die Tür.
Inge bereitet das Mittagessen vor.

You already know many verbs that take an accusative object:

haben, lernen, brauchen, anrufen, essen, trinken, nehmen, suchen, kennen, machen, lieben, hassen, besuchen, besichtigen, bestellen, bekommen, mögen, putzen, kontrollieren, vorbereiten, waschen, öffnen, schließen, reparieren …

Overview: articles in the nominative and accusative

In the accusative case, only the masculine article changes. The other articles and nouns stay the same.

Grammatical terms in German:

das Subjekt: The subject of a sentence is a fact, an object, or a living being that is active or the focus of attention in the sentence.

das Objekt: The object of the sentence describes a person or thing that is the target of an action or event. It is also called “Satzergänzung”, and is usually a noun or a pronoun.

A noun can have different functions within a sentence. It can, for example, be either a subject or an object. Depending on what function the noun has, its form can change. This is most noticeable by its article. In German, there are four different forms or categories (cases), called Fälle or Kasus.

Two of these cases are the nominative and the accusative.

der Nominativ: The subject is always in the nominative case. The articles take the form: der/ein, die/eine, das/ein, die/-.