Last class you learned that Malayalam builds words like trains. Today you get the most important set of carriages in the whole language. In English, when you want to say where something is, or who it belongs to, or who you gave it to, you reach for a little word and put it in FRONT of the noun: in the house · to Raman · of my mother · with my friend · from the shop Malayalam does not use little words in front. Malayalam attaches an ending to the BACK of the noun. Traditional grammar names seven of these endings and calls them the cases. Now — the word "case" frightens people, usually because of a bad experience with Latin, German or Russian at school. Let me remove that fear straight away, because Malayalam's case system is far kinder than any of those. The endings are regular. There are no genders to memorise. There is no table of irregular exceptions waiting to ambush you. You learn seven endings and you have replaced every English preposition at once. That is the trade. Seven carriages, and prepositions stop being something you translate and start being something you attach. In this class: • All seven cases, what each one does, and the ending that marks it • Which English preposition each case replaces • Why Malayalam cases are gentler than Latin, German or Russian • How the case ending couples onto the noun-train from Class 60 Take Class 60 on agglutination first if you have not. Quizzes below. Dr. Reshmi R Nair — SpeakMalayalam.