Genitive case in German
The genitive case in German is a strange phenomenon these days. It’s currently being wiped out of the language… but in the meantime is still used sometimes.
Its weird, on-its-deathbed status means that the genitive is rarely used in common, everyday German; but it is still hanging on by its fingernails in academia and other formal registers.
Unless you are at a place in your German studies that you can’t think of a blessed other thing to work on other than the genitive case, I would actually recommend continuing to bypass it for now.
Dependent on your studies or line of work, you may never need to actually use the genitive itself (outside of maybe a few, easy-to-memorize phrases).
But if you do choose to learn the genitive case, you’ll probably understand the news, legal documents, and literature a stitch better … and there is something to that!
In English, the genitive is frequently also called the possessive case. This is misleading. The genitive case actually has a much wider range of usage (and there are other ways of indicating possession that don’t involve the genitive case).
The genitive case can be used in the following ways:
- to denote ownership (Tom’s puppy)
- to talk about part of a whole (a slice of cake)
- as the subject of a verbal noun (the landing of the plane / the plane’s landing)
- as the object of a verbal noun (the construction of the house)
- to otherwise qualify or define a noun (a ray of hope)
For our purposes, let’s loosely define the genitive case as indicating possession. (English professors look away!)
Loosely defined, German uses the same two ways to formulate the genitive and when to use which one is actually very similar to English, too! Cool!
The two ways to for the genitive in German are:
- Add an s (no apostrophe!)
- Use the structure modified noun + determiner (and/or +adjectives) + modifying noun
Adding an -s
In German, we can add an ‘s’ (no apostrophe!) to names or family member terms IF listed right in front of the noun they’re modifying: Vaters Computer, Opas Haus.
Modifying the sentence structure
If a determiner and/or adjective(s) is added, we need to use the #2 setup, which is equivalent to the ‘of’ phrases in English. (This is the ‘classic German genitive’):
Der Computer meines Vaters (My father’s computer, literally ‘the computer of my father’)
Das Haus meines lieben Opas (My dear grandpa’s house, or ‘the house of my dear grandpa’)
We also use this #2 variant of the genitive if we’re relating to nouns that aren’t people
(so, this is more limited than the animate vs. inanimate genitive nouns in English):
Das Dach des Zuges (the roof of the train)
Das Kälbchen der alten Kuh (the old cow’s calf, or ‘the calf of the old cow’)
Just as in English, there is a third way to indicate one nouns connection to
(or possession of) another noun … but it doesn’t necessarily involve the genitive case.
