The Germans learn these cases in the school but then they forget. They just know how to make correct sentences. Every language has its unique rules. Why has Chinese tone system? We cannot ask, why? We have to accept the rules of any language. The problem with foreigners is that they are taught in a wrong way. They are just fed with the rules of Grammar and they keep thinking in terms of Grammar, der die das, deklination, endings, accusative, dative, .... etc. So they cannot speak the language fluently. The best way to learn is to remember standard expressions and sentences without thinking about the grammar. These standard sentences will later serve as a reference when something is unclear. For example learn the expressions like, "in manchen Fällen .. ", "in anderen Ländern.." , "mit einigen Beispielen"..... etc. instead of learning the dative plural rule with ending.

Hi Kaffrine, I've just found some links which should be quite helpful. http://www.udoklinger.de/Deutsch/Grammatik/DekNomen.htm http://www.deutschegrammatik20.de/das-substantiv-nomen/kasus-nominativ-akkusativ-dativ-genitiv/ http://deutsch.lingolia.com/de/grammatik/deklination/genitiv-dativ-akkusativ/uebungen Kind regards, Georg

Why we Germans use these cases? I don't know. Language evolves and is used naturally. Nominative and the other cases are linguistic descriptions and the names first used in describing Latin language. For example the "genitive". It shows a relationship between two nouns, which often implies "posession". Genitive is also used in English: 's or of - German: Peters Haus is English Peter's house, or less good English "the house of Peter". In Chinese and other languages you use particles to create this relationship (Chinese "de", in Japanese "no" in Vietnamese "cua") ... There is no need to study this intensively and most native speaker won't be able to explain the cases to you -why should they be able to know all this? They aren't linguists. Learning a language means you need to know rules how this languages functions. You should not make rules absolute. Try to focus on the words and try to speak and use them naturally. A piano player also knows how notes are created and a piano functions, but when playing he does not think about this theoretical stuff.