Честность помогает людям доверять друг другу.

the person

Breakdown of Честность помогает людям доверять друг другу.

• помогать: to help
• доверять: to trust
• друг другу: each other

Questions & Answers about Честность помогает людям доверять друг другу.

What is the basic grammar of this sentence?

It breaks down like this:

• Честность — the subject, in the nominative case
• помогает — helps, 3rd person singular present
• людям — to people, in the dative plural
• доверять — to trust, infinitive
• друг другу — each other, here in the dative form

So the structure is basically:

[Subject] + helps + [someone, dative] + [infinitive] + [object of the infinitive]

A very literal reading is:

Honesty helps people trust each other.

Why is людям in the dative case?

Because помогать normally takes the person being helped in the dative.

You ask:

помогать кому? — to help whom?

So:

• помогать другу — to help a friend
• помогать детям — to help children
• помогать людям — to help people

That is why you get людям, not люди or людей.

Where does людям come from? Is it related to люди?