18 cases

Those have cases? I thought their gender just had to be matched

here's an example for german articles. Both case and gender have to be matched.

Attached: German_definite_article_declension.png (350x138, 21K)

You can express more complex ideas with cases if that's what you mean

>but what else can have cases?
everthing, but verbs and prepostions

Right well technically adjectives and everything else can take the same case endings as nouns when they behave like nouns as in "the long one" or things like that but they don't have to match the noun when they are in front of them as determiners

You don't really need to learn them all to be able to speak.