How do I figure out which case to use?

As an English speaker, a language that no longer uses cases, it can be really tricky to get to grips with the German case system. But once you start practising, you'll find it's not as horrible as you think! The cases: Nominative The nominative case is the easiest - it just means the subject of the sentence. So, the person/thing that is doing the action. In the sentence "The cat sat on the mat", the "cat" is the subject, because it is the thing that is doing the acting - it's sitting on the mat. ACCUSATIVE: The accusative case is the object of the sentence, so normally the other person/thing in the sentence. Again, using "the cat sat on the mat", we see that the mat is the accusative object, because it is the other noun in the sentence. DATIVE: Dative can be a bit tricky, but don't worry! In a sentence, it's normally the person/thing that something is being done to. So take this sentence: "A present was given to the boy" - here, the boy is the dative object, because something is being given to him. The word 'to' can be a big clue as to whether the object is dative, but it's not always there. Sometimes, it's just hinted at - "I gave [to] my sister a present". GENITIVE: The genitive object is normally just the person/thing that would in English have 'of' in front of it. "The car of my mother", "My friend's book [the book of my friend]". See, it's not so difficult once you think about it logically.