Case systems are markers or changes to a word that indicate its function in a sentence. This can be hard for native English speakers, French speakers, or Spanish speakers to understand, because the modern versions of English, French, and Spanish have almost no case system. A quick example in English might be the use of “apostrophe s” or “‘s” to indicate possession. When other languages was to indicate possession, they either add a marker (such as a diacritic in Arabic) or they modify the word itself (like in Russian).
It can be hard to wrap your head around this if you use a language that doesn’t have a case system because a key part of understanding is being able to understand the usage of something. If your native language doesn’t use case, it can be hard to wrap your head around this. A helpful way to think about it is as the ultimate “you-can’t-claim-to-not-know-what-or-who-I-was-talking-about” grammar rule. For instance, in English we know that in the sentence “I eat grapes” “I” is the subject, “eat” is the verb and “grapes is the object. One reason is because we have a pretty fixed word order. You typically wouldn’t say, “grapes I eat” or “grapes eat I.” Both of them sound overly formal and the second sounds like you’re saying the grapes are eating you, and since there is no reported case of someone being eaten by grapes, this sentence doesn’t make sense.
Other languages, however, do switch around their word orders quite frequently. Case systems help make it clear what function a specific word serves in a sentence. So even if you said, “grapes eat I” it would be clear who is eating what based on the form of each individual word, regardless of the spatial order.
Arabic has 3 cases:
Russian has 6 cases:
- Accusative
- Dative
- Genitive
- Instrumental
- Nominative
- Prepositional
German has 4 cases:
- Accusative
- Dative
- Genitive
- Nominative
The Magnetized Man 