“Contractions“
Join as a member to continue learning
Find out more
Find out more
All lessons, tools and premium features (and there’s a LOT of them :).
Already a member?
Already a member? Log in here
This article belongs to the following series:
Settings
Audio Speed 100%
Adjust the playback speed for audio examples -- still sounds fine down to about 70%.
Dark Mode Switch between light and dark mode -- your choice is remembered for future visits.
Still a work in progress, so let me know if you spot a glitch.
Diese ist die beste Erklarung von Deixis oder “pointy-ness”
Slightly different pointyness question…
Auf Englisch, “English already uses ‘that’ here, …” liest besser als “English already uses that here, …”, das Sie geschrieben haben. Sehr wahrscheinlich nur ein typo, aber vielleicht das ist anders auf Deutsch? Does the equivalent German construction not need some kind of quote or other indication to differentiate between the word ‘that’ and the thing that ‘that’ refers to? (ie does the magic of German grammar and expressiveness make it obvious which is intended?
Oh, no that’s just a typo. I forgot to make it bold like all the other words that are just words.
You need to mark it in German as well, that it’s not part of the normal sentence. Otherwise it’s just as confusing for the brain as in English.
Hi, guys, I’m new in this community, I got a scholarship and all because of you, thank you so much, I hope everyone receive more than you gave
Wow, that’s a great wish :)!
Hallo Emanuel, es ist schon lange her:) toller Adventkalender! Eine Frage zu diesem Beitrag: wie benutzt man jener/jenes/jene? Könnte man es sagen: “Oh, in jenem Café kriegst du keinen ordentlichen Kaffee.” Dann würde es den Gegensatz von ‚diesem’ bedeuten, also das Cafe nicht da neben mir, aber ein bisschen weiter entfernt. Es ist komisch, ich habe am Anfang meines Deutschlernens gelernt, jener usw, als ‘pointy word’ benutzen zu dürfen ..aber ich habe es tatsächlich nie von Muttersprachler gehört..:/ wie funktioniert es? Danke! Bori
Hmm , ich habe vorhin den Beitrag von gegen gelesen,also, ich korrigiere mich, ich meinte Gegenteil statt Gegensatz
Hmm, Gegensatz passt auch. Es ist ja nicht wirklich ein dirketes Gegenteil.
Übrigens:
Gegenteil von
Gegensatz zu
I literally never use “jene-” in daily life. It just sounds soooo fancy and high brow.
Ein bisschen so wie “hither” in Englisch, aber nicht ganz so extrem :)
Ach so!! Ok, es ist dann theoretisch richtig, aber wird nie in der gesprochenen Sprache benutzt ? Ist es eher literarisch?
Genau :)
Super, alles klar! Und danke für die Korrektur bzgl Gegenteil-Gegensatz:)
Wirklich hilfreich, ich hatte keine Ahnung von der Unterschieden aber irgendwie hat es Sinn gemacht! Vielleicht entwickele ich langsam Sprachgefühl..
Hier übrigens ein sehr gutes Video über Sprachgefühl und der bessere Weg es zu entwickeln!
https://youtu.be/ilXxAfO58Jc
Hahaha… this is so old school :). The Boomer is strong in this one.
Seriously though, I think it’s actually pretty interesting :)! Thanks for sharing!!
You explain your definitions like that of a surgeon at work.(any contractions here )
I like that metaphor, danke :)
Sehr, sehr hilfreich, wie immer, und es hat auch Spaß gemacht. Vielen Dank!
Gerne, gerne!
This point was always a mystery for me: in dem or im. thanks for this precious precision.
In spoken English [at least in Australia] specificity I know what you mean but no one would use the word pointy-ness] is dealt with by stressiing the word the. Otherwise it is sounded much shorter. Or the indefinite article is used. Do Germans use stress to identify specificity when speaking?
Absolutely!
– in dem Café
– in DEM Café
The second one sounds way more poin… I mean specific :)
(I know that it’s not really a word, but everyone understands what I mean. Specificity can be misleading for non-native speakers)
Gerne, gerne!
Re your example of lowest pointiness: In English we would say “Thomas likes working at a cafe,” rather than “the cafe.” Because as soon as you use “the” it suggests a specific cafe. “A” is the least pointy. A further subtlety: we would more often say “in a cafe,” although using “at” is not wrong, just not as idiomatic. Love this year’s Advent calendar. Thanks!
Cool, vielen Dank for the insights :)
Great article. Just when I think “I already know this topic”, Emanuel introduces a practical twist that books don’t have, but is important for real language usage.
Ha, I knew you would like this :). Glad to see you’re still reading along. Wie läuft es mit deinem Deutsch??
Thanks for the insightful article, it’s really the little things in language that make the difference in meaning and fuller expression.
Gerne :)
Danke für this. Interesting and enlightening, just the thing for Advent.
Danke dir :)!!
Thanks for the short but meaningful lesson – so valuable coming from a native speaker. Why they couldn’t just spit this out at Uni is beyond me. Woulda saved me loads of uncertainty.
Seriously, I’m suffering from Quiz-withdraw. Where’s the quiz?
You really hate uni :D. You keep bashing it in every comment!
The quiz will come later in the calendar. I have to ration the content a bit :D
Uni deserves a good thrashing.
They have completely ruined my love for reading, made me abhor Goethe (whom I loved since highschool),
They make unrealistic demands that only serve to distance students from the subject (Is having to write a Wissenschaflicheaufsatz after 2 terms of German REALISTIC? And only ONE of those terms count as the first one was Anfänger – the second was “Grund”),
Their disdain for teaching the language is unacceptable, “We’re at uni – WE would never sink so low as to Teach A Language! We only exist to DISSECT the language!” They look down on “Sprachschule” which is pitiful because Sprachshule produce people who speak the language. And the classes are full. There are only 3 students left in German because it’s that much fun – Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish and Italian are all full. Dunno know about Russian. And why? Because they are teaching the LANGUAGE, not dissecting it.
They way they look down their noses at Jugendbücher is an unsavory blend of unacceptable and laughable – not only are the books we read as children and young adults part of what forms us but reading this stuff gives us a common reference point with Germans, you know, those people that SPEAK the language we’re dissecting!
It’s like saying to your 6 month old baby: Um, carrot puré is boring, let’s jump straight into beer and chips, ‘K? Uni jumps over puré, dipping fries in chocolate shakes and goes straight to beer and chips when our livers are not ready to break down alcohol and we don’t have any TEETH!
They aren’t there because they have the love and passion for the language and to teach (like you, Easy German and a list of others) but because they are getting paid to write abstruse papers and in order to motivate an office space at Uni, they have to “teach” a few hours a week.
There is so much more – not gonna bore you to death with it. Let’s just say “thrashing” and “bashing” barely suffice – STRANGLING would be more appropriate.
Wow, it really runs deep!
One thing made me think though… you said they have a disdain for TEACHING the language.
I can kind of understand that. I mean, not the disdain, but a sentiment that it’s not their job to be a language course.
I don’t know how the study program is set up. But students of the German language should have a b1 fluency before they enter the actual studies, in my opinion.
Maybe a preliminary mandatory course would make sense, so that everyone can study this program, even if they know zero german at the beginning.
But the end goal of studying German as Uni should be something different than that of a language course.
I mean, you’re going for a degree there, right? Like a BA?
It’s not “just” a language certificate.
I hope you understand what I mean.
I hate uni, too. 50% of the programs do NOT need uni. I’ll tell my kids to swerve around it if they can. Or to just go, have fun and then drop out.
waw, that’s so great to know a new thing like this. Thank you so much, have nice weekend
You too, danke :)
Reminds me of a piece of grammar I read somewhere (but have now all but forgotten) about da- prepositional adverbs and when to vocally stress the “da” and when to stress the preposition bit. What is the rule here?
Generally, the “da” has more emphasis than the preposition.
Well, if you heavily stress “da” then you have a really strong pointer.
If you stress the preposition then you’re putting the focus in that.
In both cases of heavy stress, you’re likely to actually be dealing with a single “da” and a prefix verb.
– Ich fahre da DURCH.
– Ich fahre dadurch, dass…. . (neutral, actual da-word meaning “through the fact” )
– Ich fahre DA durch.
Does that help?
Thanks – yes that’s more intuitive. I’ve dug out the passage from Hammer’s German Grammar and Usage that I was trying to remember:
“When the prepositional adverb replaces preposition plus pronoun, the second syllable is usually stressed da’durch, da’mit, dar’an In spoken German the first syllable may be reduced, e.g.: dran, drauf, drin, drunter. However, if the prepositional adverb replaces a preposition plus a demonstrative, (i.e. = ‘with that’, ‘in that’, etc., see 5.1.1i), then the first syllable is stressed, e.g.: ‘dadurch, ‘damit, ‘daran. ’Damit war alles unter Dach und Fach”
The phrase I always think of is the commonly uttered expression “Wie kommst du darauf?”, where the “da” seem to get quite a heavy stressing, as would the “that” in “How did you come up with that?”
Or at least I think the “da”/”that” gets stressed when you want to emphasise just what a daft idea you think it is.
Yes, exactly. If you’re “neutral” toward the idea then it’s a pretty bland “darauf”, but if you think the idea is outlandish, then you’d say “DArauf”.
Ah, I think I have to retract my statement somewhat, actually. In your example, “darauf” can be pronounced either way (stress on “da” or no special stress) depending on how pointy you need it to be. Hammer’s description is pretty accurate, I would say.
Thought you might have mentioned that in German, the *other* kind of contraction is “die Wehe,” which is a cognate of the English “woe.”
Just another one of many places where German beats English at expressing reality…
Hahaha… true, true.
Which of these is great German and which is bad German?
Also do they mean different things (pointiness-wise)?
Ich gehe im café
Ich gehe in dem café
Ich gehe ins café
Ich gehe zum café
Ich gehe zu dem café
Ich gehe am café
Ich gehe an dem café
(Disclaimer: I am not a native speaker.)
The normal sentence is the third one, “Ich gehe ins Cafe.”
This is a case where German is very picky about spatial relationships. Technically, #1 and #2 aren’t grammatically wrong, but they are very strange. When you use two-way prepositions with dative they describe the location of an activity and not the direction/destination, so #1 and #2 would mean something like, “I’m doing power walking exercises inside the cafe”. #6 and #7 also sound strange since they mean “I’m by the cafe, walking”. (A more normal example would be “Ich gehe am Strand” meaning that the location where you walking is “by/along the beach”.)
Concerning #4 and #5 (with zum/zu dem), the normal rule is to use “in + accusative” if your destination is a building/room that you actually enter (ins Krankenhaus, in die Bäckerei, ins Wohnzimmer, etc) and to use “zu (+ dative)” if your destination is a noun that you don’t literally enter (zum Arzt, zur Arbeit, …). It’s not completely “wrong” to say “ich gehe zum Cafe”, but this could be interpreted to mean that you went to the cafe, but you didn’t go in (vielleicht gehst du zum Cafe und wartest draußen auf deinen Freund.) In fact, it would be totally normal to say “Ich fahre dich zum Cafe” meaning “I will give you a ride to the cafe” (but of course I will not drive you all the way “ins Cafe”!)
Wow, this answer is much better than mine.
I said #6 and #7 were wrong but technically they do mean “alongside the café”. It’s theoretical, but grammatically, it’s okay.
I really have nothing to add to this answer, that was perfect :).
Barratt, Mosalig (“Master of speaking about location in German”)
All except the last two are grammatically correct.
“ich gehe im Café” is weird because it explicitely means that you perform the act of walking inside of a café. Same for the second one.
The other three are idiomatic but “in” has more focus in “inside” and is more idiomatic than “zu”. “zu” would fit for a quick dropping by.
As for the pointy-ness… that’s pretty much how I explained in this article ;)
I am so very grateful (almost beyond words) for the Advent Calendar and the above answers to my contractions query.
How about when I have entered the café and I now report to my friend who is late arriving for our lunch appointment, via my mobile phone :-
“I have now arrived and I am walking inside the café from the entrance to a table in the far corner where you will find me waiting for you with a bunch of beautiful roses! ”
Which contraction will best express my walking (using gehe) inside the café towards the corner table with a most beautiful view where my heart will be broken if my friend fails to arrive?
Perhaps Emanuel would like to enact this beautiful / tragic love story in an Episode of German is Easy filled with German contractions covering every imaginable shade of pointiness?
Roger from “English is much Easier than German” ;-)
You’re reading too much into these contractions, I think. They’re not so much a stylistic choice rather than a necessity… or better, the lack of one is a necessity.
And I feel like you’re mixing the question of whether you can contract or not with the question of which preposition and case to use. They have nothing to do with each other.
In the (theoretical) text message, you’d say this:
– Ich laufe im Café vom Eingang zur/in die hintere Ecke, wo du mich mit einem Haufen Rosen findest.”
You could “un-contract” im, if the café needs special focus for some reason. I can’t think of one though.
Have you read my article on two way prepositions, by the way?
Hallo, kann man diesen Advent Artikeln als gelesen markieren? Ich konnte das machen für Artikel 4 und 5, aber nicht für die andere. Ich habe eine Sammlung von grünen Häkchen angefangen!
Ich habe vergessen, das so zu einzustellen. Es müsste jetzt gehen :)
Danke!
Formality?
? What do you mean?
I mean that “contractions” in English are consid informal writing. Is it different in German?
It’s definitely different. The reason is that there’s actually a “logic” behind when to use them, as I explained in this post. That of course applies to written German, too.
So yeah, you NEED them in writing as well.
I think you misunderstood me. I understood your point about “Pointness”. My question is if I am writing a report for my boss since I need to use a really formal language, would it differ if use “in dem Café/im Café an der Ecke” as one might sound more formal if both are possible
It depends on the context! It’s not a question of formality but of what you are saying in that exact situation. It’s usually not a style choice. Without context I can’t answer your question.