Cases in one page: five on paper, three you use daily

Every Romanian grammar opens with a table of cases, and every English speaker’s heart sinks. Here is the same information without the table’s reputation.

The five names

Romanian has five cases: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, vocative. That is the whole list, and it never grows. Two notes that shrink it immediately:

• Nominative and accusative look the same on nouns in almost every sentence you will say.
• Dative and genitive share their forms — one shape, two jobs.

So on paper: five. In daily use: three shapes, and one of them is just hey, you.

Where the cases actually show up

On the noun, through the article. Take casă (house) and its four shapes you will really meet:

Form	Job	Example
casa	this / seeing it	Casa e mare. — The house is big.
casei	to it / of it	Ușa casei e albastră. — The door of the house is blue.
casele	the houses	Casele sunt vechi. — The houses are old.
caselor	of the houses	Acoperișurile caselor — the roofs of the houses

Notice what did not change: the word itself. The ending does the work.

On the pronouns, all the time. This is the part you need in week one:

• Îl văd. — I see him. (accusative)
• Îi spun. — I tell him. (dative)
• Îmi dau seama. — I realise. (dative reflexive)
• Le cumpăr. — I buy them. (dative/accusative plural)

A sentence with a pronoun is doing case grammar whether you noticed or not.

Vocative is the easy one: it is how you address someone. Mamă! Ana! Bună, Ionuț! — same word, sometimes a small ending, always the shout.

What to do with it

Do not memorise the table; memorise the forms of the nouns you already use. Every new word arrives with four numbers, not one: casă, casa, casei, casele. Say them out loud when you learn the word and the case system stops being a separate subject — it becomes how nouns are stored.

And when you get it wrong: nobody stops understanding you. A wrong case in Romanian reads like a slight accent, not a broken sentence. That is unusually generous, and it is the reason you can afford to learn this by using it.