A Dative object takes the dative case. So when a sentence describes something happening or being done to something or someone then that object or person takes the Dative case.

For example: The teacher helped the students.

The Teacher is the Object and therefore Nominative, the Student is being helped, so is Dative.

Der Lehrer hilft den Schülern

The article changes to use the dative case.

Here are a couple of interesting links describing “dative”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dative_case

http://german.about.com/library/blcase_dat.htm

Here are the easy dative articles:

dem – Masculine

der – Feminine

den - Neutral

denen - Plural

I won’t bother writing the way I said it… I’ll just write down his response.

Nehmen – to take

Ich nehme

du nimmst

er,sire,es nimmt

Ihr nehmt

sie nehmen

Du hast genommen!

After a little research, it seems that abnything in the past tense is genommen.

Ich habe genommen

du hast genommen

er, sie, es hat genommen

etc. etc.

So what I should have said was:

Hallo, bitte nimmst du ein parr bier aus dem Kühlschrank, weil letzte Woche Ich habe zwei flaschen aus dein bier genommen.

Roughly translated: Hello, please take a few beers from the fridge because last week I took two of your beers.

Likewise, anything in the future tense takes the form; nehmen.

Ich werde nehmen – I will take

Du wirst nehmen – you will take

Note: This whole page only covers present tense. If you are interested in some good resources on other tenses, you are in the wrong place. (… as of June 2009. Give me another 6 months.

The most useful thing that I have found to date is the consistency in the way that verbs change depending on the subject. Using the verb “haben” as an example, note the bold italic letters.

haben – to have (have, have got, own, possess, wield.. etc.)

This is worth memorising:

• Ich habe
• du hast
• Sie haben
• er, sie, es hat
• wir haben
• ihr habt
• sie haben

And this is the other bit worth memorising:

1. If you are using “du”, then the verb almost always ends in st. Eg. Du hast,  du laufst
2. If you are using “Ich” then they usually end in e. Eg. Ich habe, Iach laufe
3. If you are speaking about someone else specifically, it’s er, sie or es and you usually use t. Eg. er hat, sie lauft
4. Remember that all the Sie’s, (I.e. Sie – formal “you”, sie – she and sie – they) are the same, so you can go off the change for er, sie, es.

Obviously there is a whole lot more to it than this, but if you can remember these little hints as you speak, then you’ll guess about 70% right when you have to grab a new verb that you have just learnt and mash it into a sentence.

http://translate.google.com/translate_t#

Definitely worth checking out.

The thing that I really like aboutthe Google translator is that it remembers which language I want, so when I open my home page it is already set to English to German (or vice versa depending on which way I translated last time.)

Another simillar tool is Yahoo Babel Fish which is also very useful.

http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_txt

I arrived at the cuorts to meet a few of the local guys. We had organised six players, 3 teams to play side out drills.

I got there and there were two guys warming up and one more just arriving. Plenty of other people around on other 3 courts were hanging out or playing games.

I shouted across the court to one of the guys: “Hey Hansi, haben wir sechs hoyte”?

Everyone around the courts stop what they are doing and look at me…

Hansi laughs and says: “Nein Tristo, wir haben kein sex,… aber wir sind sechs hoyte fur training.”

That was my German lesson for the day.