Language/German/Grammar/Cases

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There are four cases in German: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive.

Nominative(Nom. or N) indicates the subject of a verb, such as "the monkey" in "The monkey eats a banana." "Der Affe isst eine Banane."
Accusative(Akk. or A) indicates the direct object, such as "a pen" in "He bought a pen." "Er hat einen Stift gekauft."
Dative(Dat. or D) indicates the indirict object, such as "him" in "His father will give him a tricycle." "Sein Vater wird ihm ein Dreirad geben."
Genitive(Gen. or G) usually indicates the possesor of something, such as "my mom" in "This is a helicopter of my mom." "Das ist ein Hubschrauber meiner Mutter."

Prepositions may require accusative, dative or genitive objects. They can be found here: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/German/Grammar/Prepositions_and_Postpositions/ . Verbs may require accusative, dative or genitive objects. Dative verbs are few and can be found here: http://germanforenglishspeakers.com/reference/dative-verbs/ and genitive verbs here: https://www.thoughtco.com/frequently-used-german-dative-verbs-4071410/ . And genitive verbs are even fewer and easy to be memorised. You can assume other verbs are all accusative, if you don't want to bother search each new verb you meet.

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