Hello everyone,
and welcome to a new episode of Grammar Jargon explained.
In this series, we go over common and not so common grammar jargon terms and try to understand what they actually mean.
And today, I have an especially elusive one on the menu, because today we’ll look at
Subordinating Conjunctions
It’s one of the lesser known terms and you don’t really need it in English like ever, but you will see it in German, because sooner or later, you’ll read or hear something like this:
“A subordinate conjunction makes the verb go to the end.”
Books and teachers often use the term, but they just kind of assume you know what they are.
Many people do not know that, however, and many people are too shy to ask.
Sure, you can look it up yourself, but many of the “quick explanations” online are a bit lazy or faulty and don’t really help.
Today, that’ll change.
We’ll work out step by step from scratch what conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions do and what they do different than other words.
Then, we’ll have a look at the most common ones, check out how they work in German and in English and we’ll take a look at other languages in the world.
So are you ready for a round of grammar? Great!
And now, let’s hop in.
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In your example, ‘so’ is confusing to me because I think of ‘also’ or ‘deshalb’ in German, which are conjunctive adverbs. Is there a way to effectively differentiate conj adv and suco
rather than just memorizing by heart?
You can tell by looking at the word order in the sentence/phrase.
if the verbs cluster up at the end, the word is a subordinating conjunction.
If the verb comes after the word in question, then it’s an adverb filling position 1.
– Ich habe Hunger, weswegen ich jetzt essen gehe. (Suco)
– Ich habe Hunger, deswegen gehe ich jetzt essen. (conj adverb)
Does that help?
Hello Emanuel.
I was watching a native German speaker on Youtube who made the following statement and also printed it on the screen: “Ich spreche fliessend Deutsch, weil Deutsch ist meine Muttersprache”.
Shouldn’t the sentence be “Ich Spreche Fliessend Deutsch, weil Deutsch meine Muttersprache ist”?
Technically yes, but the trend in spoken German is to use “weil” like a coordinating conjunction. So it doesn’t change the word order. It’s really common in spoken and I guess it’s creeping into writing as well.
Thank you! Very helpful.
Hello Emanuel.
May I ask a question about the word-order of side sentences here?
I understand that side sentences show the real German word-order, which implies that verbs are the most defining (important) element of sentences.
However, I am curious/suspicious which verb will be the most important if side sentences contain more than 1 single verbs. for examples,
1.1 Ich muss zur Schule gehen
1.2 ,dass ich zur Schule gehen muss
2.1 Ich stehe früh auf
2.2 dass ich früh auf stehe
If the most defining verb element is “conjugated verbs”, may I ask how German people feel it’s appropriate to move them to the second position in normal sentences?
Thank you so much
The “most defining” is the one that’s actually describing what’s happening.
What’s going on here is an obligation, not me going somewhere.
The verb that is “going on” is the conjugated one and that’ll be at the end. The other elements before it (other verbs, prefixes, nouns) are in a way just specifications.
Why do we move it to position 2? No idea honestly… German word order used to be more flexible, similar to Latin and many eastern European languages, but for some reason it focused more and more on having the conjugated verb second in a main sentence.
Hello Emanuel
Thank you so much for your reply.
I came to the article for confirmation of word order, but really like the box explanation of subordinate clauses and how to recognize them.
Glad it makes sense to you :).
I also have an article dedicated to the box model. It’s a bit old and needs an edit, but I think you might enjoy that as well:
https://yourdailygerman.com/german-sentence-structure/
I was just randomly rereading this article today, and noticed a bunch of typos that you might want to squash in a (very) bored moment. In particular, the “conjugations” => “conjunctions” change would be worthwhile to avoid any confusion by beginners! :-)
Nestlay => Nestlé
“So subordinating conjunctions is a special kind conjunctions.” => “…are a special kind of conjunction” or “…are special kinds of conjunctions”
“…the Australian Aborigines and it means something,” => “…the Australian Aborigines and it means something like, ”
“no skipping or stuf like that” =>” no skipping or stuf*f* like that”
“conjugations” => “conjunctions”
“…as far as subordinating conjunctions all the issues don’t matter” =>”…as far as subordinating conjunctions go, all the…”
“stuf like that. ” => “stuff like that. ”
“you can fin dit in books too.” => “you can find it in books too.”
“So… the suco packs one Action such a box” => “So… the suco packs one Action in(to) such a box”
“…as an additional information. ” => either “…as additional information. ” or “…as an additional piece of information. ”
“After and before can be preposition as well as sucos” => “…can be preposition*s* as well…”
“I amcause hungy eat pizza” =>”I amcause hungry eat pizza”
“Maria wantscause talk about the diner calls Thomas” => “Maria wantscause talk about the *dinner* calls Thomas” (“diner” is also possible, but I’m guessing you were going for “dinner” here)
Oh wow, that was a lot of typos. Vielen Dank!!
Also, damn, this article needs a trimming. I even used the f-word in the intro, that means it is REALLY old.
I trimmed a little already, but I’ll probably do a little more.
Anyway, thanks for making it a little better. Those were too many typos for sure!!
“so there is a difference in structure and a difference in vocabulary but other than that German and English are pretty similar.”
Love this!
Hahahaha, I don’t remember if I wrote this as part of the joke or if I meant it seriously (I didn’t check the context right now) :)
For different kinds of “and,” try Japanese. “To” for joining nouns in exclusive lists (this and that and no other things), “ya” for non-exclusive lists of nouns (this and that and maybe some other things which I won’t bother listing), “soshite” for joining sentences, “mo” for “both this and that,” sore ni (like soshite, but more a spoken form than a written form), plus more, including all the verb endings and adjective endings which do very similar things to what the word “and” does in English. (And adjectives and verbs are not exactly separate beasts, but I digress…)
Mind blown!!! That’s a really great example for how different languages can be :)
I never dove deep into terms before not in English, not even in my own language Arabic so this was a very interesting read. And now I’ve got stuff from all 3 languages popping in my head it’s crazy T^T maybe I should let things calm down before I ask but whatever you should deal with the madness too :P
How do relative sentences play into all of this? It is a subordinating conjunction being its own box and answering to questions with “which” but we can’t move it around can we? and to me it feels like sometimes it can connect “things”, “entities” but maybe my mind isn’t clear enough to disprove these thoughts right now.
For example this feels like connecting a thing (not that it feels like a preposition):
– The book that I read is good
as opposed to sth like this which feels like any other conjunction/subconjunction connecting 2 actions:
– Can I borrow the book that we talked about?
TBH I’m not sure what I’m asking about here lol! but I’d love to hear anything you have to say on this.
Lovely explanation of subordinating conjunctions: thank you very much. I could never really make much sense of the much-ballyhooed distinction between clauses that could stand alone and those that couldn’t, and it’s nice to know that I’m not alone. It’s an old post, to be sure, but a really good one, so it’s probably worth editing the “pony” examples to kill of a couple of errant “it’s” that should be “its”. That should highlight the intended grammatical error in the second one a little better!
Hah. And I was worried that I am the only one who was bothered by this clause-stuff and people would just be wondering why I am even doing this analysis here :). Thanks so much for your feedback. And for the corrections, too. Back then, I didn’t pay as much attention to this particular mistake (which gets on my nerves nowadays, when I see it :). Viele Grüße!
Hi, this has been super helpful, trying to integrate this and the adverbs post to understand this category I recently found, ‘conjunctive adverbs’but failing. All these deshalb/deswegen words seem to allow you to ask ‘for what reason’ from within the first main clause. “Ich esse zu viel, deshalb bin ich dick”. So why aren’t they subordinating conjunctions? Any pointers? Thanks for any help.
The difference between conjunctions and adverbs is their grammatical function.
Adverbs (most of them anyway) can answer to questions.
– Warum? Deshalb!
– Wann? Dann.
– Wo? Dort.
Conjunctions can’t do that. They cannot answer to questions and they cannot stand alone because they don’t really have “substance”. They’re grammatical function.
– and, because, if
They can both connect thoughts, and sentences but grammatically, only conjunctions do.
– Ich habe Hunger, deshalb esse ich.
Here, the sentences are joined because of the comma.
– Ich habe Hunger. Deshalb esse ich.
Let me know if that helps.
ob=whether
ops… I should know that :D… thanks for the catch
Aaaaweeesome , Im just new in Germany, from an exchange school in México and you are saving my life!! You are helping me a lot with my german , thanks!
Cool, glad to hear that… viel Erfolg beim Lernen :)
I’m glad you didn’t mentioned anything about Ersatzinfinitiv. You would probably talk people into studying Spanish instead of German :)
*didn’t mention
Quite frankly… I don’t really know what that is right now :D
Stumbled upon this website a few days ago on Reddit. It’s one piece of brilliant work you have here. I definitely would recommend it to my peers. Maybe one day you could get your own domain and actually earn some money from it. Just one quick question: Have you ever considered doing ‘Redewendungen’ as well? That would help us get by the common expressions used in the language.
Anyway, keep up the good work!
I kind of did something like that on Facebook a year ago but all I did is basically name the Redewendung and give an explanation and a translation… but that is being done a million times elsewhere so I stopped. As for the blog… well I kind of don’t want to annoy people with more E-mail-notifications and last but not least… I really like the grind of explaining in detail :)… but I do include common ones in the posts so if you Google for something you might find me :)
The Word of the Day posts are great (*coughwouldlovetoseeebenatsomepointcough* Ugh, that was kinda gross. Sorry.) but it’s nice that you mix it up for time to time. As someone who actually enjoys studying grammar, I appreciate the work you put into these explanations.
Just out of curiosity, how well is that whole thing where the modal verb, helper verb, and normal verb all hang out together actually understood by German natives? For example, would some native speakers naturally switch up the verb order in: “Ich glaube, dass ich es werde machen müssen” (if they would ever actually say such a thing)?
I know you want to see eben … eveyone wants to see eben :D… but it is just so hard to get a hold of this word so I keep procrastinating… but, compared to a year ago I have gathered a lot of “info/feel” about it so I feel like I am getting there. It just doesn’t feel ready yet :)
As for the other question… that is a good point. First of all, these constructions are kind of rare although the mechanics do also apply to passive or conditional constructions.
Anyway… people DO trip up there regularly, even politicians and journalists. I think the problem is that they talk faster than they think so when they realize what they should do it is too late and they have already said “Ich glaube, dass ich es machen… äh… ”
Then people stop and repeat or stutter something but what they DON’T do is going by the “regular” order and saying:
“Ich glaube, dass ich es machen müssen werde.”
This feels really really wrong and is even comparably hard to process and understand. So… everyone is aware of what needs to be done, but to do it you need to be very very aware of your sentence as a whole.
But when you’ve correctly produced one of those things it is very satisfying … at least to me. I always feel like I have solved a difficult equation and the result is 1… just like in school. You know that it is correct and you’re feeling a little “Fuck, yeah!” :D
for anyone still confused, as I was, there’s a relatively straightforward explanation of it on the wikipedia page for german/grammar/sentences: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/German/Grammar/Sentences , under the heading “dependent clauses with three verbs”
Noch einmal, eine fantastische Artikel. Danke!
Bin grad nochmal rangegangen und wollte etwas ändern und ein bisschen kürzen… jetzt ist er noch länger :D… und, wie ich gesehen hab’, voller Fehler. Ich habe mich sehr beeilt beim Schreiben, denn ich wollte fertig werden…
deshalb bin ich superfroh, dass ihn trotz der Länge jemand gut findet :)
Ich lerne so viel aus deinen Artikeln.. Vielen Danke!
Kleine Korrektur: vielen Dank! Ohne “e” :)