This is possibly the dumbest of questions.

[paradigm]

I think the most important roles of nouns for a newbie to know would be:
Nominative/Subject/Agent (There's a certain difference between them but that is not very important now): Pretty much the noun making the verb happen.

Accusative/Object/Patient (same as before): The noun that the verb affects, more or less.

Indirect object (dative): A sentence like "I gave him a book" contains one subject (i.e 'I'), one direct object (i.e 'book'), and finally one indirect one (i.e 'him'). Which noun that gets to be which object is decided almost completely from verb to verb. In the case of the verb 'to give', it's the one who receives.

Vocative: This one is used to get the listener's attention or to exclaim whom the message is for. In many languages, including English, this just comes down saying the name or the nominative of whatever one is talking to. Famous example from programmers: "Hello World!"

Locative: To tell where the action, the verb, happened. This is accomplished by prepositions in English, like for example "I was inside the house"" where the preposition 'inside' tells us where the verb took place. Remember that this is by no means universal, 'inside the house' would just as an example be translated in Finnish as 'talossa'. Here, the suffix -ssa means the locative case. Finnish also has many other suffixes for things like 'at the house', 'out of the house' et cetera.

Instrumental: To use the noun as a tool. Some might say that it means the same thing as 'with' in English but that is not entirely true. The sentence "I'm eating sushi with chop sticks with my friends" has the preposition 'with' once used as a marker for instrumental but the second time it's used to tell in whose company I'm eating.

Genitive: This one fits almost perfectly with the 's' used in English to indicate ownership and the like. Of course, its use is a little broader than that but you know that already.
The genitive can not exist without its counterpart, which is...
Possessive: What is being possessed by the genitive. For example "Dave's grandmother" where 'Dave' is in the genitive and 'grandmother' is in the possessive.

Hi, another newbie here. This whole thread has been useful (I'm in a similar situation to the OP, being pretty confused by all the linguistic terms) but this is a great overview and this is the first time I haven't felt overwhelmed with new information. Just wanted to say thanks, this has helped a lot!

[KomradeCaedes]

I'm very grateful for all the advice help you all have given me. I frequent other forums and message boards, and this has got to be the friendliest I've seen.

[qwed117]

Pardon me, but what? How does a passive voice lead to victim blaming? If anything, active voice encourages the blaming of someone.
The window was broken.
Someone broke the window <- now we are blaming an agent for the act, rather than focusing on the fact the window is now broken.

Bah, it's irrelevant...

(Umm...What's your question? You just said it yourself, passive blames patient, while active blames agent)

The principal criticism against the passive voice is its potential for evasion of responsibility. This is because a passive clause may be used to omit the agent even where it is important:

We had hoped to report on this problem, but the data were inadvertently deleted from our files.[5][11]
Krista Ratcliffe, a professor at Marquette University, notes the use of passives as an example of the role of grammar as "...a link between words and magical conjuring [...]: passive voice mystifies accountability by erasing who or what performs an action [...]."[19]

[Keenir]

It's not really fair for me to say I want to used stripped-down "Germanic" grammar structures, so much as I want to base the project on what I learned when I studied German in high school.

actually, it is perfectly fair to say that. German is a Germanic language.

Basically, I want to start with things I'm familiar with, and see where it takes me.

that's the best path to take!

[Prinsessa]

You could always look at Icelandic or other related IE langs to mix it up a bit and not copy German exactly.

Another Germanic language with case, Icelandic has the same premise as German at a first glance (the same four cases and weak vs. strong adjectives) but uses the tools a bit differently (especially evident in the differences in usage of adjectives between the two languages).

[idov]

Hi, another newbie here. This whole thread has been useful (I'm in a similar situation to the OP, being pretty confused by all the linguistic terms) but this is a great overview and this is the first time I haven't felt overwhelmed with new information. Just wanted to say thanks, this has helped a lot!

No problems. I was worried that my noun crash-course 101 would be all over the place, so I just gotta be glad that it helped y'all.
Oh, and also don't worry about Prinsessas "rebuttal" this early on; even I am not entirely sure I've heard of what he is talking about.

[Prinsessa]

Oh, and also don't worry about Prinsessas "rebuttal" this early on; even I am not entirely sure I've heard of what he she is talking about.

Huh? I haven't said anything that was supposed to be negative in this thread.

What are you talking about?

EDIT:
Oh, the indirect grandmother? That wasn't for OP but for the one I was quoting. Even for a newbie, tho, it seems a little weird to describe possessive like that because it might just bring along more confusion. I'd just leave possessive out entirely for now.

[idov]

Yeah, that's why I put the word in quotation marks. I never thought you were negative, especially not after your cute smiley c; Seriously though, it may be a weird way to describe the possessive but I can't edit what has been quoted.

[Prinsessa]

Yeah, that's why I put the word in quotation marks. I never thought you were negative, especially not after your cute smiley c; Seriously though, it may be a weird way to describe the possessive but I can't edit what has been quoted.

I can! :D But I'm not the only one who's quoted it by now, unfortunately.

But yeah, OP should do as you said and ignore my words there.

Weird and weird. It's a completely accurate description for some languages. But in the context of the basic IE cases IE langs will generally use one of those other cases in accordance with the sentence at hand rather than a possessive, even alongside genitives. That's all I meant.

[cntrational]

I recommend finding a copy of A Practical Introduction to Phonetics, which'll teach you how to understand and pronounce IPA and phonetic descriptions.

[masako]

I recommend finding a copy of A Practical Introduction to Phonetics, which'll teach you how to understand and pronounce IPA and phonetic descriptions.

Or, if one prefers to save both time and money, one might click this link.

[J_from_Holland]

I recommend finding a copy of A Practical Introduction to Phonetics, which'll teach you how to understand and pronounce IPA and phonetic descriptions.

Or, if one prefers to save both time and money, one might click this link.

I do find these veeery helpful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_pulmon ... with_audio
IPA symbols + audio

[cntrational]

I recommend finding a copy of A Practical Introduction to Phonetics, which'll teach you how to understand and pronounce IPA and phonetic descriptions.

Or, if one prefers to save both time and money, one might click this link.

Well, the book I recommended has specific exercises for pronouncing sounds, teaches you how to think of sounds in purely articulatory and not phonetic terms, and allows you to pronounce things that require diacritics in IPA or simply don't exist in normal IPA.

[GrandPiano]

teaches you how to think of sounds in purely articulatory and not phonetic terms,

Although it's a great idea to focus more on how an unfamiliar sound is articulated than how it sounds when trying to produce it, it can sometimes help a lot to know what the sound sounds like. I never would have been able to produce ejectives if all I knew was that my glottis had to be closed and make a piston-like movement. And when it comes to vowels, it can be hard to precisely pinpoint where your tongue needs to be, since unlike with consonants, there aren't specific landmarks like "the hard palate" or "the alveolar ridge" to place your tongue at; you have to position your tongue based on an imaginary matrix in your mouth. Given this, it can be helpful to know whether a close-mid back unrounded vowel sounds more like "uh" or "eugh".

[HoskhMatriarch]

I recommend finding a copy of A Practical Introduction to Phonetics, which'll teach you how to understand and pronounce IPA and phonetic descriptions.

Or, if one prefers to save both time and money, one might click this link.

I do find these veeery helpful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_pulmon ... with_audio
IPA symbols + audio

I'm going to have to agree with this. Wikipedia doesn't leave out alveopalatals, epiglottals, lateral flaps, and some other unmodified sounds, and it discusses all sorts of modified sounds and modifications to sounds. It's not even really possible to speak even normal English with just the sounds in the first link.

[masako]

It's not even really possible to speak even normal English with just the sounds in the first link.

What kind of English are you speaking?

[gestaltist]

I have a great iPad app with pronunciations of all IPA sounds + videos that actually show how they are pronounced. The videos are a little gross for stuff like epiglottals since they actually show the inside of the mouth but they are very helpful to learn things. It’s called IPA phonetics.

[GrandPiano]

It's not even really possible to speak even normal English with just the sounds in the first link.

What kind of English are you speaking?

Maybe he's referring to the lack of aspirated stops? Then again, I don't think the Wikipedia link has those either.

The videos are a little gross for stuff like epiglottals since they actually show the inside of the mouth but they are very helpful to learn things.

I was disappointed when I found out that there weren't more of these kinds of videos on YouTube, so I'll probably be looking for that app.

[masako]

Maybe he's referring to the lack of aspirated stops?

I'd've thought those fairly intuitive. I guess I was wrong.

[elemtilas]

It's not even really possible to speak even normal English with just the sounds in the first link.

What kind of English are you speaking?

Maybe he's referring to the lack of aspirated stops? Then again, I don't think the Wikipedia link has those either.

The videos are a little gross for stuff like epiglottals since they actually show the inside of the mouth but they are very helpful to learn things.

I was disappointed when I found out that there weren't more of these kinds of videos on YouTube, so I'll probably be looking for that app.

One place one can go as a resource is the IPA itself: https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org Books and recordings have generally to be bought, but at least it's directly from the horse's mouth...