German Prepositions with Accusative and Dative

German Prepositions

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:

The solution to this problem are mnemonics:

1. 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.
2. 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.

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