Probably, you know that Ukrainian has cases. But what are they like? How many of them are there? What words change? Let's find out.

There are 7 cases in Ukrainian. Nouns, pronouns, adjectives and numerals decline (=change) by cases:

Nominative (Називни́й) – used to name (назива́ти) a thing; the subject of the sentence and the words in the dictionary are always in this form.

Genitive (Родови́й) – used to tell about the origin (рід)/belonging of a thing, in negations and when talking about quantity.

Dative (Дава́льний) – used when you perform an action for someone: to give (дава́ти) to whom? (кому́?).

Accusative (Знахі́дний) (used when a thing is the object of the action: to accuse whom? → the object, to find (знахо́дити) whom? (the object).

Instrumental (Ору́дний) – used to name the instrument of the action.

Prepositional/Locative (Місце́вий) – the only case form which is always used with a preposition and denotes the location (where? де?).

Vocative (Кли́чний) – used to address (кли́кати) someone.

We don't learn the cases one by one or in the above given order. Rather, we start with an easy and functional one, the prepositional case, and proceed with other cases, building them on this foundation. Let's start.

P.S. If you don't know how to define a noun's gender, take this course. If you aren't sure how to make a noun plural, check this out.