Often verbs with prepositions in German form a fixed connection. Sometimes this connection is so close that the verb without a preposition is not used at all. There are lists of verbs with prepositions (look at the end of your textbook). But we’ll go a little different way: we will begin to analyze groups of prepositions in terms of their meaning to make it easier to remember.
German
Reach an agreement: vereinbaren vs verabreden, ausmachen etc.
Today we’ll talk about agreements, these will be verbs vereinbaren vs verabreben, ausmachen (abmachen), absprechen vs einigen sich, übereinkommen and nouns Vereinbarung, Verabredung, Abmachung.
Fahrstuhl or Aufzug or Lift
The German dictionary consists of 33 volumes and about 320 thousand words. It took more than a hundred years to compile it, and another 60 years to process it. And this is not surprising, because they have several words for many things. Take for example “lift”: Fahrstuhl or Aufzug or Lift or Paternoster.
Modal verbs in German
In this post, modal verbs in German, their meanings, forms and modal verbs as a way of expressing doubt.
Description of a person’s appearance in German. 3. How to avoid repetition in essay
German language, with its very fixed order, requires special attention to repeating of the beginning of a sentence. Here we will look, how to avoid repetition in essay in German. Also, in any essay in any language, it is very important not to repeat verbs. In describing appearance, the verb “to have” is too active. Therefore, let’s explore alternative verbs and constructions.
Past tense in German. Perfect and preterite
The past tense in German is covered almost entirely by only two tenses – Perfekt and Präteritum. It’s a master skill if you master the Plusquamperfekt, but in reality, 100 percent of the time you can avoid it. In this topic, we will look at
how the perfect and the preterite differ from each other,
when they use haben or sein in the perfect,
and at the end we will give tables of irregular verbs by group.
Describe appearance of a person in German. Body and clothing
We continue to describe appearance of a person in German. In the first part, it was about the head, but the appearance is most often not exhausted by it. We turn to the length and width and other characteristics of the body and clothing.
Describing people’s appearance in German (Personenbeschreibung)
Describing people’s appearance in German is difficult types of essay. You should, firstly, know the appropriate words, and secondly, correlate these words with the appearance of a person. At best, people are able to name eye color, hair color, hair length, and eye/mouth size. It is no less difficult in this type of essay to preserve a variety of sentence structures. It is clear that without training it will be a continuous “he has …”
The first part is about the basic principles of describing people’s appearance in German. An example of possible assessment by the teacher and adjectives for different parts of the head are given.
Separable verbs in German
Separable verbs in German are not so difficult, but they require constant attention, even for those who already speak German well and this makes the rule difficult. In addition to the basic rule, let’s also consider how (in)separable verbs combinations with noun, pronoun, adjective are written (Rad fahren, kennenlernen, leidtun, wieder sehen / wiedersehen, etc.).
Blume vs Blüte
In German, the difference between Blume vs Blüte is somewhat more complicated than the difference between tulip flowers and apple blossoms.
What is the difference besides the presence and absence of an umlaut?