Lesson 5 - The cases & definite article

Hello everybody, 

hope the last lesson wasn't to0 scary or discouraging for you, as this one would be a kind of a closer look at what we've learned on the previous one. This time it's not about cases in general. Today we're gonna take a look at the definite article, or articles and on how they change "from case to case". Some simple examples will be given so that you won't have to go back to the previous lesson in search for the "magic table with all the cases" :) 

But before we'll go on with cases, some new vocabulary stuff that will be useful in further exercises  :

der Mann, Männer ´- man, men
die Frau, Frauen        - woman, women
das Kind, Kinder       - child, children

The definite article

The definite article can have six forms : 

der

des

dem

den

die

das

Yup..believe it or not, just 6 of those exist in nature, and , when written like that they don't seem that hard to remember, do they ? :) but again, there  are millions of "ways, tips&techniques" etc that will suggest you how to remember them more easily and so on..for me , I started with probably the dumbest  approach - I've learned those like poems, starting with masculine  - der, des, dem, den (and to make it even more fun I made a sentence in which each word started with the last letter of these articles, which looked like this : "Rocket SciencES - My Nightmare"... and yeah, I know it doesn't make any sense at all, but from the day I started my journey with "cases" I still remember masculine cases' articles perfectly))

After that I decided that it makes much more sense to use "learning by doing" approach, which in this case meant picking some easy sample sentences and then trying to remember the basic patterns that can be seen there. 

 But anyway, 6 articles in total  - these are used in 16 positions of German declesion system as follows : 

And now using our words from the beginning of the lesson : 

And now, as usual, some basic exercises to help you to rember this material :

Please fill in the correct definite article :
Exercise 1/3 

 and the answer would look like this :  

...actually now that I look at it, I can see that my "poems" are really useful here. "Rocket SciencES My Nightmare" , and "Extremely Red NapkiN, Evidence"....what ?  ....alright, so much for the stupid examples, I'll leave that to you guys.

Just two more exercises and we're free to go :
Exercise 2/3

......

and the answers are :  

                             

and last but not least
Exercise 3/3

......

and the answers are :  

allright, shit just got a little hard :) but no worries, it's all managable as long as you're persistent enough.

To make things a little bit more entertaining when it comes to blogging, I'm gonna add a "motivational quote" or smth like that at the end of each post regarding the grammar. (of course with english translation , 'cause otherwise...well it won't make any sense will it ? :)

Wer unglücklich ist, der verdient es zu sein.
He who is unhappy deserves to be.

   - Ludwig Börne (1786-1837), 'Aphorismen'

That's it for today's huge portion of grammar. Stay motivated, positive and germanizzzzed :)
Take care,

Bryvus