Please could you explain the what the dative in German is?

The German dative is a grammatical case which can be applied to nouns or pronouns to indicate what we call in English an 'indirect object.' Whereas a noun in the accusative case is the direct object of a verb, a noun in the dative will be indirectly affected by the verb. Since the dative case doesn't exist in English, we can often (but not always) substitute in 'to/for' to translate it from German.E.g. Die Frau gibt dem Mann einen Kuss = The woman gives (to) the man a kiss'dem Mann' = 'the man' in the dative case As you can see above, we can spot the dative case by a change to the article before a noun (here 'dem').