How to learn cases in the beginner stage

[DaveAgain]

I'm still massively bad at production though, and I can't say anything without thinking, oh that was wrong, and then guessing something else. I feel like maybe I'm getting to the point where I need to drill if I ever want to get beyond beginner-level "My name is..." conversations.

Have you tried increasing the amount of talking you do?

[cathrynm]

With Japanese, I've hit the stage where I can speak calmly, though I do get stuck sometimes. With Finnish I need tutor perhaps, maybe after JLPT. I'm pretty cringe-inducing in this language.

[Chung]

I've been learning Modern Greek, which includes several cases: nominative, accusative, genitive and vocative. My grammar book introduced me to the cases along with all the different feminine, masculine and neuter forms. I've never learned cases before (to be honest, I didn't even know what they were... ) and it's kind of a mess. Looking at these tables of all the different forms and when to use them is mind-numbing.

How do I go about learning these cases? Is this something that requires drilling, flashcards and memorization? On one hand, I'd like to use massive input after reading StringerBell's method of learning Polish, but I can't read well enough in Greek to get much input. Should I not worry about cases, then? I'm worried to ignore something seemingly so important, but maybe someone with more experience can ease my concerns.

Given your linguistic background and what everyone else so far has posted here, try this:

1) Remember that case endings are fundamentally just a way to show how nouns and adjectives in a sentence relate to each other as well as to other elements of that sentence. In English and French, we may show these relationships by relying more on word order or prepositions. In a crude sense, you could think of many case endings as if you would attach prepositions to the end of a word (e.g. instead of "of the house" you say "the house-of").

2) If it helps, read these descriptions about the Hungarian cases and the Turkish ones. Because of these languages' characteristics, case endings are just that - case endings. There are no distractions caused by grammatical gender or arbitrary subdivisions related to the noun's form*. After reading those summaries of Hungarian and Turkish declension, compare short sentences from English or French with those from Greek. How about getting a hold of renaissancemedici or Denzagathist on the forum? They're native speakers of Greek, and might be able to help by explaining the differences between the translations while showing you how a sentence in a case-marking language gives the same meaning or impression as one from English or French, which have almost no case-marking.

As an adult learner, I don't see that much value in memorizing or drilling cases hard when you're pretty unsure about what you're to supposed to convey in that case-marking language in the first place. If your Greek course is structured well enough, you'll learn the cases as required and gradually anyway. However if you go deeper into it, you'll almost certainly turn to reference books or just explanations of grammar in your textbook where more technical explanations and terms are used. It's a little like medicine, I think. Unless you're a medical professional, no one expects you to gain detailed knowledge of disorders or bodily functions. However it will help you to have a basic understanding (or an understanding with minimal technical jargon) of at least some bodily functions or frequently-occuring disorders so that if you have to explain things to a doctor or understand how some drug works you can start to do so without being bamboozled or resorting to imprecise (or incorrect) descriptions that may make the doctor misdiagnose your problem or prescribe some useless treatment. Contrary to StringerBell, I would get a certain understanding of the terms used to describe grammar, including the names of the case, and where they usually occur. Mass exposure alone eventually leads to you getting the endings right, most of the time, but you often are then at a loss to explain things and may fall back on the unedifying "it just sounds better" when rationalizing why you express something one way but not in another. This doesn't work too well with adults since we often want to get a better handle on what's happening to put ourselves at ease, even if we have to look things up in a quieter moment.

I saw this kind of thing first-hand in one of my German classes where someone who spoke German at home kept getting nailed on using the genitive. He just couldn't quite wrap his head around it, and when he did get the right answer his best rationaliziation was "Aber es klingt besser" (but it sounds better) when he was ignoring that there was actually a transparent rule/principle being applied.

---

The first language with heavy case-marking that I studied was Latin, and a lot of it just went over my head. Part of the problem was that its case endings like in Greek not only mark case, but also number and grammatical gender, all in one suffix. To add to the complexity, I also had to recall that not all nouns draw on the same set of case endings, even if these nouns are of the same grammatical gender. This all makes a chart of Latin (or Greek) declension more intimidating than it could be when you read that you have to deal with "just" 6 cases (4 for Greek). When I moved onto Hungarian, cases started to make sense rather quickly despite there being at least 16 of them. When comparing case-heavy Hungarian sentences with their translations in the "case-light" English versions, I realized that all that I was doing with case endings was giving some information about a noun for which in English I'd need to modify with a preposition or put in a certain order to give off the same information. With Hungarian, I could really focus on understanding each case's nature and begin to see how everything fits, and not worry about something extraneous like noun class or gender. When I moved onto German, and then Polish, cases themselves weren't a problem but I now needed to deal with the fact that case endings in those two other languages "respect" gender (and to varying degrees, noun classes).

* You could argue that vowel harmony sets off an arbitrary sub-division within nouns, although the degree of variation among a set of endings for a given case is minor and predictable in comparison to case endings used in Greek or Latin.

[zjones]

Thank you everyone for your replies. There is so much good advice and I'm taking it all into consideration. It sounds like my first course of action is to get my hands on a proper Greek course -- something that moves a little slower than the book I'm currently reading (which seems more and more like a grammar overview). I also started looking for different descriptions of syntax and use from around the internet, and I'm understanding the use of each case better and better. I liked this video, which I'm linking in case other Greek learners stumble across this thread later.

It's really easy to overwhelm yourself when a language has new features, and I think particularly so in a language with a foreign alphabet. Maybe I'm just not great at foreign alphabets but it always adds a new layer of difficulty for me. Maybe it would be easier to learn from audio examples first?

Ah yes, the Greek alphabet definitely adds another layer of confusion for me, thanks for pointing that out. I was looking at cases in different languages (Polish, Hungarian) and the use of Latin letters made it way easier to comprehend what was happening with each case. I like the idea of using audio examples alone or alongside the Greek case tables. It's also confusing because the Greek alphabet has 7 or 8 different combinations which all make the sound /i/, so even though three words have different case or gender and look different (ending in οι or ει or η, for example), the endings will be pronounced the same.

[Mooby]

Just a practical tip that might help:
To avoid the effort of checking cases in grammar books or detailed grammar tables (that include all the exceptions), I wrote down all the regular declensions onto three small white cards as follows:

- NOUNS [Singular] Masc. Fem. Neut.
- NOUNS [Plural] Masc. Fem. Neut.
- ADJECTIVES [Singular + Plural] Masc. Fem. Neut.

I stuck these cards onto the wall at eye-level by the chair where I read and study. The aim was to make case checking super convenient so that I can be reading a Polish story and affirm / understand declensions whenever I want with a quick glance. The cards are still on my wall after years of study, but I very rarely need to check them these days. I still turn to the books for exceptions and number declensions though.

[StringerBell]

Remember that case endings are fundamentally just a way to show how nouns and adjectives in a sentence relate to each other as well as to other elements of that sentence. In English and French, we may show these relationships by relying more on word order or prepositions. In a crude sense, you could think of many case endings as if you would attach prepositions to the end of a word (e.g. instead of "of the house" you say "the house-of").

This is a great way to think about cases.

Contrary to StringerBell, I would get a certain understanding of the terms used to describe grammar, including the names of the case, and where they usually occur. Mass exposure alone eventually leads to you getting the endings right, most of the time, but you often are then at a loss to explain things and may fall back on the unedifying "it just sounds better" when rationalizing why you express something one way but not in another. This doesn't work too well with adults since we often want to get a better handle on what's happening to put ourselves at ease, even if we have to look things up in a quieter moment.

I don't have any issue with wanting to learn the terms of the cases or the actual rules, I just think it's less stressful and more meaningful to wait until one has a decent foundation in the language before seriously trying to study them. I will probably at some point actually study what the case rules are in Polish (though I doubt I'll ever be able to remember the names of them), but by the time I do so, I will already have a good feel for what the patterns are and it will feel more like an explanation for what I've already picked up on (or maybe explaining things here and there that I've overlooked).

I think the main problem with studying the cases right off the bat is that coupled with learning a new script and/or having few-to-no words to apply those cases too, it can feel really overwhelming and hopeless because it makes the task of learning the language more daunting than it needs to be. I think there's a much bigger bang for the buck focusing first on acquiring basic words and sentence structure.

[tarvos]

I often think of the cases as numbered, usually. Nom - 1, Gen - 2, Dat - 3, Acc - 4, Instrumental (ablative) - 5, prepositional - 6, vocative - 0