[Originally posted on 03/25/15 on the Duolingo Turkish for English speakers forum by AlexinNotTurkey]
Welcome to your second of the 7 cases in Turkish. You have already been using the nominative case to describe subjects and some objects.
The accusative case in Turkish is used to mark specific direct objects. What does this mean exactly? A specific direct object is one that uses the article the. For example:
As you can see above, the accusative is only used when referring to the newspaper. General direct objects do not take the accusative or the plural suffix. Adding these to general direct objects in Turkish is simply not correct.
The accusative case is never used on subjects in Turkish. Do not translate every specific noun phrase with the accusative case. There is no way to distinguish between “a cat” and “the cat” when the subject of the sentence by using the accusative case. Only when they are direct objects is this possible.
[Updated by Danika_Dakika starting 03/01/22]
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