Purpose

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to correctly assign and use the key prepositions of each fixed-case group.

Lesson Explanation

This lesson consolidates the preposition groups already individually mentioned in the previous three lessons into a systematic overview — a genuinely important difference from many other languages, where prepositions don’t “require” a case at all.

Accusative prepositions (Part 3, Lesson 2): durch, für, gegen, ohne, um — a helpful mnemonic phrase, “durch für gegen ohne um,” can be memorized as a single, if nonsensical, sentence.

Dative prepositions (Part 3, Lesson 3): aus, bei, mit, nach, seit, von, zu — also often learned as the mnemonic “aus bei mit nach seit von zu.”

Genitive prepositions (Part 3, Lesson 4): während, trotz, wegen, statt — a genuinely smaller group, with the already-mentioned trend toward dative replacement for “wegen” in colloquial speech.

A genuinely important, practical principle: the case is determined ENTIRELY by the preposition itself, regardless of the noun’s function in the rest of the sentence — you cannot use the preposition’s meaning to “figure out” the case; it must instead be learned together with each preposition, similar to how a noun’s gender (Part 1, Lesson 1) must be learned together with the noun itself.

Practice Questions