In this course of video lessons, I want to give a brief explanation of the dative case in Latin – how to recognise it and what it does.

If you are not able to recognise the dative case, or not able to understand how it is used, your progress in Latin will come to a sudden and perhaps a final stop. If you do know the dative, you will have no trouble with the genitive and ablative. Indeed, you will have no further trouble in principle with learning Latin.

Therefore – and here is a phrase, I will use several times in this course of videos – a full understanding of the dative case is of critical importance. You cannot make solid progress in Latin until you have mastered it. Therefore these videos. In them I explain how to recognise the dative case, and how to distinguish it from other case-endings that are identical and that can be confusing. I also show the basic use of the dative, which is to show the distinction in Latin between direct and indirect objects in a sentence. Finally, I look at some of the other uses of the dative.

I hope you will find the videos useful, and that you will be encouraged to check out my other courses.