We use the dative case when the noun is given something.
Take the following sentence:
passeri vulpes panem dat
If we ignore the noun cases, we could translate this as:
sparrow fox bread gives
That’s not nothing. You know there’s a fox and a sparrow, and they are joined inan act of charity. But who is pitching and who is catching? When you recognise that the sparrow is in the dative case, you know he or she is the recipient of the gift. The fact that the fox is in the nominative confirms that the fox is doing the giving.
You really only need to know one of these things to translate the sentence with complete accuracy. Sometimes you may have to hack your way through a translation like that, but it’s obviously better to know exactly how these simple sentences work. Things will get a lot more complicated, and these examples will give you an anchor. I’ll direct you to the grammar pages from time to time. They more Latin you have read, the more sense they will make.
There is a third noun in that sentence, by the way. Can you work out which case panem is in, and why? You can probably also see why this case is called the dative.