In the German language there are four cases: nominative, genitive, dative and accusative. You've already encountered all of these before, but in the following lessons we'll dive deeper into when and how they're used. In this lesson we'll start with the nominative case.

The nominative case is the most common case, and it describes the subject of a sentence. We teach all nouns in the nominative case first, and we always teach them together with the definite article to indicate their gender, so there shouldn't be many surprises in the table below, except maybe in the right column and the bottom row.

	Definite	Indefinite
Masculine	Der Mann ist klein. The man is small.	Ein Mann weint. A man is crying.
Feminine	Die Katze ist schön. The cat is beautiful.	Eine Katze spielt. A cat is playing.
Neuter	Das Auto ist groß. The car is big.	Ein Auto fährt. A car is driving.
Plural	Die Autos sind groß. The cars are big.	-

Note that in the nominative case, the feminine indefinite article is eine instead of ein, and also note that the plural definite article is die, regardless of the gender of the noun.

Breakdown of Der Mann ist klein.