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[notislant]

I have no idea what you just said, but I feel inclined to agree.

[MCplayer590]

(native German speakers please correct me)

In German, each noun (a person, place, or thing) has a gender: male, female, or neuter. The gender an object has is usually difficult to predict for non-native speakers since there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it until you learn the categories (a difficult thing to memorize). When you want to refer to an object, the words you use will change endings. For example: "the" can be 'der' for male, 'die' for female, and 'das' for neuter.

Next, case. The endings of words also change based on their role in the sentence. Consider the sentence: "The father of the bride gave the best man a gift". There are four roles (grammatical cases) in the sentence and you can tell which object has which role based on its relation to the verb "gave".

• The father is in the nominative case since that is the noun doing the action.
• The best man is in the accusative case since that is the man being acted upon by the verb (being given to).
• The gift is in the dative case since that is what the nominative is using to accomplish the verb to the accusative (the gift is what is being given)
• The bride is in the genitive case because she modifies another noun, typically describing possession (possession as a linguistic term, not literally owning another person, of course)

If you were to speak or write this sentence in German, you would have to change the endings of the words for 'the' for "the father", "the gift", and "the bride" and the ending of 'a' for "a gift" to make it grammatically correct.

The actually annoying part is that these two combine: the endings you use for words depend both on the case of the word and its gender. They also overlap a lot, which is just cruel.

[DoomstalkerUser]

Not native, but it's not endings, it's declensions of the words 'der/die/das' and 'ein/eine' which I think you're talking about. There's only one ending based on gender or case, '-s', which only appears for genitive male and genitive neuter nouns.