Welcome to this deck on German relative clauses. Relative clauses are an essential tool for making your sentences more descriptive and complex, a key skill at the B1 level. They act like adjectives, giving more information about a noun. For example, instead of saying 'The man is my brother. He is standing over there', you can combine these into one elegant sentence: 'The man who is standing over there is my brother'. In this deck, we'll learn how to form these clauses in all four German cases.

Let's start with the nominative case. You use a nominative relative pronoun when the noun you are describing is the subject of the action in the relative clause. The relative pronouns look very similar to the definite articles: 'der' for masculine, 'die' for feminine, 'das' for neuter, and 'die' for plural. A key rule for all relative clauses is that the conjugated verb moves to the very end. For example: 'Das ist der Mann, der aus Berlin kommt.' Here, 'der Mann' is the one who 'kommt aus Berlin', so he is the subject, and we use the nominative pronoun 'der'.