an Accompanying Guide to Any First-Year German Course

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Table 1.4: Man
For the impatient:
• man is neither masculine, feminine, or neuter, is
only capitalized at the beginning of a sentence, and
always takes the masculine forms of reference.
Man muss seine Hausaufgaben machen.
• When changing active sentences whose subject is
man into passive sentences, man drops completely
since it cannot become the object of the preposition
von.
• The accusative form of man is einen, the dative is
einem. Man kann einen nicht glauben machen, . . . .
Es gibt einem das Gefühl, . . . .
Ich heiße dich willkommen. (roughly: I welcome you.)
1.4 The Dative
The Dative case answers the question “to whom?” and, just like the accusative
and nominative, has endings that are added to the ein -words, the definite articles,
and personal pronouns. Most of the time, the dative case is just a re-naming of the
indirect object. It is used to convey the idea that something is doing something to
something else, which is the part of the sentence which will appear in the dative case:
Why don’t you buy me a new dictionary?
Janice wanted me to loan her my German book.
Notice that all verbs of giving, telling, showing, and the like can take indirect objects
and, likewise, can have dative objects in German, but not every sentence has to have
one–just as in English: I showed my stuff.