Everyone studying German knows this “annoying” issue: German prepositions with accusative or dative, meaning that all prepositions in German need a special grammatical case, most times accusative or dative.
In this post I will concentrate on the prepositions that can only have either accusative or dative (i.e. I will address the topic of the two-way prepositions in a different post).
So, the problem is we have to memorize wether the prepositions listed below must be used with accusative or dative in order to decline the following word(s) correctly:
| With accusative case | With dative case |
|---|---|
| für, um, durch, gegen, ohne (special: bis) | aus, bei, mit, nach, seit, von, zu, gegenüber |
The solution to this problem are mnemonics:
- For the prepositions with accusative it’s an artificial word: FUDGO. It’s composed of the first letter of each of the 5 most important prepositions in the following order: für, um, durch, gegen, ohne. So, with one tiny word, you can easily dominate the accusative prepositions. 🙂
- For the prepositions with dative, it’s a short nursery rhyme: It consists of the melody of “Brother John” (watch video below) using the following lyrics:
aus, bei, mit, nach (2x)
seit, von, zu (2x)
immer mit dem Dativ (2x)
gegenüber auch (2x)
Special case bis
It’s not as important as the other 5 accusative prepositions because it can never be combined with any article (*bis meine Wohnung is wrong). It can only go with adjectives (bis nächste Woche √). If you want to use it with an article, you must add the dative preposition zu after bis: bis zu meiner Wohnung. √
Now, after remembering FUDGO and singing the dative prepositions song ♬, you can practise your new mnemonics to memorize the German prepositions with accusative or dative with the following exercise. 😉
