German Cases – Online Practice Tool
Welcome to the YourDailyGerman Case Trainer.
Practice German cases with my flexible online case trainer. Choose the gender, case, article type and difficulty, then work through dynamically generated example sentences and learn the rules as you go.
Viel Spass!!
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Practice German cases and articles with fill-in-the-blank sentences. Pick which genders, word types, and cases to focus on, then work through as many rounds as you like.
How it works
- Choose which genders, word types (articles, pronouns, possessives), and cases to drill — or leave them on "All".
- Pick a level, then hit Create Session to start.
- Each question shows a German sentence with a gap — pick the correct option, or use the number keys (1–4).
- Wrong answers can be flagged and get queued into a Review mistakes round after each set — or anytime during an open-ended session.
- Keep going through as many sets as you like — you can change the settings anytime.
Gender
Word type
Case
Level
Set size
25 questions per set. You can always extend a set later.
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The Key to Practicing German Cases Effectively
Practicing cases is messy because it’s heavily intertwined with noun gender.
If you get the case right, but the gender wrong, your answer is wrong.
That’s why I think it’s good to take gender out of the equation at first.
That was the core idea of an exercise series I made for my students and that led me to creating this tool.
You work with one gender at a time, so you don’t have to think about that and can fully focus on the different case endings.
And you might pick up the gender of a noun here and there as well.
That was the original idea, but I added even more flexibility.
So now you can:
- Choose the gender you want to focus on
- Choose which cases you want to practice
- Choose the article type, like definite, indefinite, or possessive articles
- Choose the difficulty of the sentences
And I added a bunch of other features:
- Check the English translation whenever you need it
- Review short grammar notes for each answer
- Practice your mistakes again at the end of a set
- Use your keypad to answer, so you can drill even faster
If you have other ideas for a feature or some feedback, please let me know in the comments. I do read them and I do add more features to this tool :)
YDG German Case Trainer – FAQ
Can I practice all genders together?
Yes. You can practice any combination you want to. The tool gives you full flexibility.
Are the exercises always the same?
No. The trainer creates new questions based on your settings, so you are not limited to one fixed set of example sentences.
Does the trainer explain the answers?
Yes. Each question comes with a short grammar explanation, and you can also reveal the English translation if you need it.
Is the tool using AI?
Yes, the tool uses AI to create a sentence, but it already gets the correct case words, so it doesn’t have to “use” the case itself. And it does NOT use AI for grading and evaluation. I’m using a bunch of “old school” programmatic systems and tricks for that because AI alone is not reliable enough.
Is the tool reliable?
I’m avoiding AI for the “mission critical” bits like grading and evaluation,which is why the tool is pretty reliable (95%+). Some examples still come out a little wonky.
You can flag those to get them out of your rotation.
What happens when I make a mistake?
Examples you get wrong are repeated, and at the end of a set you can review your mistakes again.
Can non-members use the trainer?
Yes. Non-members can try the trainer with a daily practice limit. Members can practice without limits.
Is my performance tracked?
At the moment, the tool doesn’t track your performance and I am not sure it’d be useful to do that. The goal is that you drill and automate your use of cases. The goal isn’t to complete something or get a high score. Think of it as a gym you go to, rather than something you can “complete”.
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Thanks so much for developing these tools. The practice is really helping, and I have struggled for a long while. I’m signing up.
Question:
___ Bruder zeigt Maria den See.
Ihrem? Is it supposed to be “Her brother shows [her] the lake?” or “Maria shows her brother the lake?” This one I don’t get.
So these examples are created on the fly by AI and I do not save them right now so I can’t review them.
– Ihrem Bruder zeigt Maria den See
– To her brother, Maria shows the lake.
– Ihr Bruder zeigt Maria den See.
– Her brother shows Maria the lake.
Both are possible, though the latter is WAY more common.
There should be an Engish translation that clears up things like this, was there not?
This helped me so much – I am now busting through that NOM-AKK-DAT wall which has blocked me for weeks. Vielen Dank, Emanuel!
Glad to hear that :)
You have outdone yourself again with this tool, the drilling (which drives me nuts in Russian because I have no such tool) is quite enjoyable and immersive here. Great job :)
Wow, happy to hear this. If I managed to make a case drill a bit immersive, that’s awesome awesome feedback.
I stayed engaged- and usually I don’t enjoy cases because they can go over my heard at times. This made sense and I enjoyed it.
Awesome, super happy to hear that :)
This is a very useful drill that I could see myself using multiple times per week, although probably not daily. I’m relatively good with cases, although by no means perfect. Nevertheless, my first attempt was masculine with all cases and I got 25/25 on the more difficult setting. I was forced to go slowly and give them some thought. What is kind of an interesting side benefit here is knowing that the gender is consistent, more than once I found myself going, “oh, that’s a masculine noun?” For that alone I could get done use from this.
Out of interest Emmanuel you don’t offer a ‘Your Daily French’ course do you? I could do with improving my limited French knowledge – if not, do you know any decent similar sites to yours – which is beyond excellent by the way.
Normally I have low expectations from AI. But this one actually works. And it’s nice to see AI become a workhorse and actually relieve us from work for a change :D Thanks
Yeah, that’s really what it’s meant for, imo.
The bottleneck to exercises was always the content. Coming up with lots of simple sentences is tedious, entering them into a database and tagging them is too. It’s a job no one is sad that it’s gone.
Ai is just perfect for that. And if you keep the evaluation logic out of it you can avoid much of the hallucination that AI does.
Glad you like the tool. Do try out the other ones too :)
Fantastic! After the first 100+ examples, I started to relax and zone out, and it all became intuitive and obvious, and my streaks extended longer and longer. Ten thousand more and I’ll be like a native. Thank you, Emmanuel!!!
Awesome, that’s exactly how it’s meant to work. You slowly start surfing through the examples and you think less and less.
Ich helfe ___ Studenten bei den Hausaufgaben.
Hier ist beide meinen(pl.) und meinem(Sing.) richtig.
Ja, du musst bei sowas auf die Uebersetzung gucken um zu wissen, ob es Singular oder Plural ist.
I’d say it’s the most useful case practice tool that I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a few! I’ll definitely be using it again.
Sweet, super happy with this feedback, thank you :)
Ok when I chose to work on female nouns, all cases I got really frustrated today and quit. It seemed there were a high number of errors in the set, plus many things just *feel* wrong with that gender. The -er endings sound dumb to me…
Argh, not good!!
What do you mean by -er endings exactly? And what word type did you practice? like… which articles? Let me know please so I can fix it :)
I chose all articles all cases. Dative feminine gives me a lot of trouble, it tricks me by sounding more masculine (how can the word “einer” refer to a female noun???) I’m flagging as I go, please forgive me for occasional false flags and thanks so much for developing this tool. I’ve been selling cheese for 5 years and calling it “die Käse”. Whoops!
Hey, so as it is now, I don’t get the flags at all. Their purpose is to remove the examples from your current set, but I don’t save any of the example sentences, as I don’t have time to review them anyways and they’re not preproduced. I will save and curate them eventually, but not right now, I prefer building more tools like this and reviewing sentences is super boring :)
I’ll probably add more nouns to the rotation soon, too.
Is it still the case that you feel like it makes too many mistakes?
If so, I’ll have to see if I can reproduce it. It can happen like in one set, because AI is a probability game, but as soon as it’s a regular thing, there’s an issue.
Anyway, glad you enjoy the tool and thanks for following this site over the years.
Still working on the different choices, so far, so good, though. Really love the exercise and the explanations given.
In times when I prefered Ack to Dat and chose Dat anyway because the adjective-ending revealed the case, I checked with ChatGPT for a more in-depth explanation and found the combo this tool + ChatGPT explanation to give me a better feel for that pesky choice between Ack/Dat.
The recipe I use isn’t 100% accurate – it IS German, so…
I could easily add an “ask about this” field.
I’m just a bit scared about the accuracy when it comes to cases and things like that. I found chatty to be about 80% right, 20% wrong which is not really acceptable for me to present it as an actual tool on a learning website like mine. Like… if that’s the score in ChatGPT chat is one thing, but coming here, people would (and should) expect more.
What do you think?
Yeah 80% accuracy on “explanations” would suck!
Chas, my ChatGPT explains it well – methinks the faults with AI are really more with the the way the user poses the query.
No need to clog up the works with an “ask about this”-field – everyone has access to AI on their own.
Chas, Chatty, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, whoever – they are DUMB – they only do what you ask them to do – if you word your query correctly and know how to pose follow-up questions, demand documentation, AI is a very powerful tool.
If used the same way one used Google, chaos will ensue. And if you LIKE the reply AI gives you – you are doing something wrong…
It needs to be TRAINED out of any level of sycophancy – and kept on a short leash.
That is very useful, will use it more for sure. My main struggle is to remember the gender of each noun, and thus tool makes me remember the gender better, thank you!
I’d echo others’ appreciation for the tool in general. Definitely what I need right now.
I noticed that I did get a lot — say 5 not in a row– of similar (“Die Farbe … ist rot” etc.). I mean: it gives me practice in that particular form, so there’s that :)
This is interesting feedback as it shouldn’t happen. The nouns are selected at random from a list so maybe I have to add some safeguard against this kind of repetition.
How often does that happen?
Repetition happened at least twice maybe three times in my first 30 sentences.
Awesome tool, quite useful.
Thanks
Ah, that’s not too bad then :).
Thanks for the feedback and also, thanks for joining as a Super Supporter (just saw the notification email and the username looked familiar from the comments). Much appreciated!
This is Great! Maybe a type-in feature would be useful?
Super Tool. A big thank you to those of you who paid a bit extra so that I could avail myself of this wonderful learning tool. I hope to contribute soon as my situation changes.
Vielen Dank für alle die es ermöglicht gemacht haben dass ich diese Tool anwenden kann. Ich bin von Herzen dankbar. Bald hoffe ich beizutragen. Nochmals danke.
Anna hat ihre Freundin eingeladen, damit sie nicht alleine auf ___ Party gehen musste.
Anna invited her friend so that she didn’t have to go to his party alone.
1
seine
2
seinem
3
sein
4
seinen
⚑ Flag as wrong
Party is feminine and nominative because it is the subject of the clause ‘auf seine(1) Party gehen musste’.
Doesn’t the clause start with damit here, and isn’t „sie“ the subject of the clause, not Party?
Yes, that’s a typical explanation glitch.
OK, I’ve done it again at harder settings and started getting some wrong. Yay, I’m learning!
This time, I’m concerned that some examples aren’t idiomatic German.
___ Kopf tut mir weh. It’s “Der”, of course, but the choices were ein/einen/einem/einer. I’m not Zaphod Beeblebrox! ;-)
___ Gemüse ist gesund, again with indefinite pronouns as the choice. Does “gesund” here mean “keine Störung im körperlichen, psychischen und geistigen Wohlbefinden aufweisend” or “die Gesundheit fördernd”? In the first case, I don’t think it makes sense to use an indefinite pronoun. In the second case, would you ever put it this way? I’d expect something like “Gemüse essen ist gesund.”
Die Zahnpasta (der) Münder ist fast leer.
Wie bitte?
Is my Sprachgefühl off base, or all of these non-idiomatic German?
The Kopf-one is definitely off
Ein Gemüse ist gesund is awkward but okay. “gesund” does mean that it’s good for your health in this context.
The toothpaste one is a disaster.
This currently happens because I am selecting a noun and the grammar and then force the AI to create a sentence from that. So it got “definite, plural, genitive” and “mund” and it came up with nonsense then.
How often do crappy examples like this happen?
OK, thanks. I’ve tried the tool twice. These were three out of 27. The previous examples I flagged (in dem/im dem) were also three out of the round; since I got everything right that time, it was 3/25. (You may not have noticed my previous comment, as it’s still awaiting a reply to the question of whether “in dem” would ever be correct to use.)
I‘m not sure if this means anything , but the number in parentheses (1), doesn’t match the correct option which is (2)
Nach dem langen Spaziergang in dem Park tut mir ___ Hund manchmal der Bauch weh.
After the long walk in the park, your dog sometimes has a stomachache.
1
deinem
2
deinen
3
dein
4
deine
⚑
Sorry, screwed that up. This is the one I meant
2
___ Lampe im Wohnzimmer ist sehr alt und muss ersetzt werden, da die Glühbirne oft flackert.
The lamp in the living room is very old and needs to be replaced because the bulb often flickers.
1
das
2
die
3
dem
4
den
⚑ Flag as wrong
Die(1) is the definite article for Lampe, which is feminine and in nominative case as it is the subject of the sentence.
The sentences themselves come from AI, I do not track them. If your gut says something is wrong, then it probably is. Just flag it, so it gets removed from your rotation.
Is this sentence construct correct?
Nach dem langen Spaziergang in dem Park tut mir ___ Hund manchmal der Bauch weh.
After the long walk in the park, your dog sometimes has a stomachache.
This is absolute nonsense :D. Complete glitch.