[Z]

Just want to rant about how much I despise German grammar

There are four cases. They are as follows:

Nominative
Accusative
Dative
Genitive

Each case has four 'genders' to deal with, they are as follows:

Masculine
Feminine
Neuter
Plural

There is a different word for "the" depending on which gender and case you are dealing with, this is as follows:

Masculine Feminine Neuter Plural
Nominative der die das die
Accusative den die das die
Dative dem der dem den
Genitive des der des der

When you are using each of these cases and the word "the", it means something slightly different:

Nominative - the
Accusative - (into) the
Dative - (in) the
Genitive - (of) the

So if you have a sentence like:

The lion bit the man on the arm and dragged him into the den of the pride

It would go like this:

Der Loewe biss den Mann auf dem Arm und zerrte ihn in den Bau des Rudels

(maybe, I'm already confused)

But sometimes they change the word order around because they have all these different words for "the" depending on the case and gender, so you can move stuff around and it still makes sense because you can deduce the case/gender of a word by looking at the word for "the" in front of it... for example:

Den Mann biss der Loewe

Still means "The lion bit the man" but in English that would read "The man bit the lion"...

I still haven't got my head around this stuff.