Josquin wrote:s_allard wrote:By the way, it's interesting to note that, from what I understand, the genitive case is being replaced by the dative in modern German.
I don't know how often I have written this now, but the opposite is true. The genitive is replacing the dative after a lot of prepositions because of hypercorrection. Replacing the possessive genitive with a dative construction is considered dialectal, substandard, or flat-out "wrong" in prescriptive grammar.
Furthermore, stating cases don't have any meaning only shows a lack of understanding for the nature of cases. To a native speaker of a case language, certain cases do have a certain meaning. With the same argument, a speaker of Russian could state English articles don't have any meaning. Or, in other words, what's the meaning of the French subjunctive?
All of this is getting us into a philosophical discussion without any substance at all.
Two points quickly here. First, as I stated, from what I understand, there is a change in the status of the genitive case in modern spoken German. Two authors, among many others, have referred to this. Here is one in English:
Germans will often assert that the genitive is disappearing from the language. It is certainly used less than one or two centuries ago, but it still occupies an important position. Primarily, the genitive designates a relationship between two nouns in which one of them belongs to the other. The former can be in any case, but the latter is in the genitive:
...
In colloquial speech Germans often use the preposition von (with the dative, of course) instead of the genitive:
Ist das der Freund von deinem Bruder? Is that your brother's friend?
Wir suchen das Haus von seiner Mutter. We're looking for his mother's house.
This construction with "von" is always used if there is no article to mark the genitive:
Er ist ein Freund von mir. He's a friend of mine.
Das Abstellen von Farhrädern ist verboten. The parking of bicycles is forbidden.
Uneducated Germans sometimes use the dative and a possessive adjective to create a genitive effect: Bist du dem Mann seine Frau? Are you the man's wife?
...
Prepositions that take the genitive:
A number of prepositions take a genitive object. The most common are statt and anstatt [instead of], trotz [in spite of], wegen [because of] and während [during]. In normal speech, German often use the dative after trotz and wegen. The grammar-police find that appalling, but in fact the dative is actually the older form.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~deutsch/Grammatik/Nouns/genitive.html
The above website has a reference to the book with a tongue-in-cheek title by Bastian Stick:
Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod - Folge 1-3: Ein Wegweiser durch den Irrgarten der deutschen Sprache.
This can be easily purchased on Amazon.
Here is a German quote:
Zugegeben, es geht dem deutschen Genitiv nicht gut. Sein Niedergang, seit Jahren beklagt, zeigt sich an vielen Beispielen. Verben, die einen Genitiv nach sich ziehen, wie „bezichtigen“, „harren“ oder „gedenken“, klingen veraltet oder sind zu Phrasen erstarrt. Wer wird heute noch ernsthaft sagen: „Ich harre dein“? Präpositionen wie „wegen“ werden mittlerweile auch mit dem Dativ benutzt. Und das Genitiv-s wird nicht selten mit einem Apostroph abgetrennt, etwa auf dem Werbeschild von „Gabi’s Nagelstudio“. Wer den Fehler überhaupt noch bemerkt, dem graust es bildungsbürgerlich. Doch woher rührt der Deutschen weit verbreitete Genitivaversion?
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/zur-zukunft-des-genitivs-die-augen-meines-hund/9946496.html
I find it hard to believe that the genitive is replacing the dative but I might be wrong. I'm new to German.
The second point I want to make is that I agree that for native speakers case systems has meaning. The meaning is above all grammatical. As I attempted to point out with a few examples things can be wrong grammatically but totally understandable.
An to come back to the OP's question: Why are grammatical cases hard? They are hard because they are arbitrary and have only grammatical meaning that native speakers acquire through considerable exposure.
Edit: put in url's