German has four grammatical cases that govern which articles and pronouns are used. In fact English has all four of them too, but they are only apparent in pronouns such as when “she” changes “her”.

You are probably already familiar with the nominative case which applies to subjects. The other three are:

accusative - for direct objects and implying motion
dative - for indirect objects and implying staticness
genitive - used to indicate possession or ownership

Each of these three cases can also be dictated by prepositions. For instance bis (with) requires articles and pronouns after it to be in the accusative case.

In this lesson you will learn the accusative articles, which are the equivalents of “the” and “a” in English when used with direct objects or after accusative prepositions.

Direct objects are the people, places and things that receive the action of a verb. In the sentence “She waters her plants”, “plants” is the direct object and “she” is the subject. Like nominative articles in German they also change based on gender and plurality.