The Relative Clauses in Dativ are beautifully simple once you understand their concept. It will take you some time to use them correctly though. But with the help of this course you'll soon get your head around them.
You've already dealt with the relative clauses in A2 but it doesn't harm to review the basics here and there. A relative clause basically helps you connect two related sentences. In order for two sentences to relate to each other they need to have an element in common. Take a look at the following two sentences:
- Der Mann kauft ein Bier.
- Ich folge dem Mann.
Have you already spotted what they have in common? If not, take a minute before reading on.
Both sentences contain the word "Mann". I call this word "the relative". Having found the relative, we now know where to put the relative sentence and that's directly after the relative in the first sentence. Let's copy the 2nd sentence into that space already:
- Der Mann, [2. ich folge dem Mann] , kauft ein Bier.
Of course we are not done yet. Relatives stick together, which means the two "Mann" need to get closer to each other here and of course we need to take any articles with us:
- Der Mann, [dem Mann ich folge] , kauft ein Bier.
And almost last but not least, relative clauses, like weil-clauses are pusher sentences, meaning that they "push" the verb to the end:
- Der Mann, [dem Mann ich folge] , kauft ein Bier.
The very last thing to realize and to do is that "dem Mann, dem Mann" doesn't really sound nice and it's of course not how we'd use the relative clauses. The logic of a relative clause says that we are referring to the relative (99% of the times the noun before the comma) from the sentence before. That means that the 2nd Mann is redundant and therefore can be deleted. BUT we need to keep the article "dem" here.
- Der Mann, dem ich folge, kauft ein Bier.
The "dem" is now not longer an article because articles need a noun next to them and we just took "Mann" away from "dem". "dem" is now a so called "relative pronoun". Voila. We got a beautiful relative clause with the dative.
This topic is covered in: B1-L04