Hello everyone,
and welcome to another episode of our January quiz special. Which is now more a winter quiz special and I think I finally found the perfect name for it… say hello to: Quinter.
That’s .. uhm… that’s quiz and winter combined.
Yeah… I know. Leative. That’s lame and creative combined.
Anyway, so today, we’ll do a second round of a quiz about
Locations and their Prepositions
In the first one we did a few weeks ago, we went over most of the basics and even if you’ve done it a couple of times, I’d actually recommend you do it again, because the point is NOT to pass a test, the point is to learn the… thing :)
You can find it here:
Today, we’ll do a second round, and we’ll tackle some of the more “fringe” locations and also contexts that are just plain different in German to how they’re handled in English and that might hence be confusing.
If mixed up the questions a little bit, but it’s not complete randomness either, so there’s several “topics” we’ll go through during the quiz.
And of course, for each question, I’m also giving you a short explanation of the answer. That way, you learn the rules step by step as you go along.
So… if you’re ready then let’s gooooo!
Viel Erfolg!
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Danke dir für diese Übungen.
Ich habe früher von dem kostenlosen Abonnement profitiert, weil ich in Ägypten war.
Jetzt bin ich in Deutschland und kann mir das Abonnement leisten.
Ich habe mich schon für das Jahresabo entschieden.
Vielen Dank und macht weiter so
Oh, toll, dass es geklappt hat. Herzlichen Glückwunsch :)
Hi Emanuel,
In Locations and Prepositions_Quiz 1 you wrote:
“Bar” as the venue can be entered, so it goes with “in”.
Note that the “bar” as in “the counter inside a bar” goes with “zu”.
When, a question In Locations and Prepositions_Quiz 2 asked:
Thomas geht zum Bestellen ____ Bar.
(Thomas goes to the bar(counter) to order.)
I confidently chose “zu” only to get it wrong, with the explanation:
Like other “counters” the bar in a bar sounds best with an. zu also works, but an is definitely more common, especially when you stay there.
Could you please clarify?
Thank you,
Dave K.
What I say in the quiz is definitely better. The other article is quite old and I think “zu” just came to mind first, but I didn’t really dig into it mentally.
One possible idea for continuing the theme of location based prepotions would be to look at exceptions : auf der Post , auf dem Amt spring to mind.
Thank you to the people who gifted me this scholarship! I have to learn german in such a short time and I really appreciate this opportunity. And thank you to everyone who contributed to creating this website.
Thank you for sponsoring my membership.
Thanks for the great quiz! Although I did very badly the first time round, I got a much better in my second attempt :)
I’m still a little confused about the difference between an and auf, though..
10 out of 16, nicht so schlecht ne
I also want to thank all the other people who paid more than the membership would cost, that allowed people like me to have unrestricted access and the opportunity to learn German from the best website out here. I want to thank Emanuel too, keep up the good work and best of luck.
Hi ! Just a quick comment to thank the team and the people that are paying extra for sponsoring my german learning journey !
I’ll do my best to make this worthy of your generous donation !❤️
Hi Emanuel
Have you covered this topic – Present Perfect Tense. I have checked all heads under the grammar section but couldn’t find it.
Hilfe bitte ;)
I call it “spoken past”.
You can find all about it in the series on past tense, which is under “the essentials”.
Let me know if that helps.
Yess, found it !
Danke
A pitiful 9 out of 16 :(
A miserable 6 out of 16. Definitely need to do this again!
The second time really is what matters more, because then you’ll see how much you picked up the first time around.
Hi,
I’m disappointed; I got only 11 of 16 correct. I didn’t think you could say “aus dem Auto aus.” I really felt “auf dem wochenmarkt” was correct but chose “im” instead. Alas! Thanks for the exercise. Those are great questions. They really make you think. Fred
Yeah, I can imagine it looks weird to learners but “aus dem X aussteigen” and “in X einsteigen” are perfectly idiomatic.
As a native English speaker, German prepositions are just not intuitive at times.. really appreciate these quizzes and explanations, thanks Emanuel!
Yeah, they LOOK like they’re similar enough, but that’s deceiving.
Do you think a quiz on da-words would maybe be doable at some point? These examples got me thinking about that:
I guess that’s really just verb phrases that use specific prepositions, but it’s interesting how the prepositions are different from English.
Great idea!
I do have one or two somewhere burried on the site, but I don’t know where myself :).
Definitely good for another round!
Exercises like this, in which you have to supply the German from the English, are excellent. Helps move passive vocab to active. Thanks for a nice job.
War der Test aber hilfreich! Danke lieber Emanuel.
Finding these quizzes super fun and useful, 15/16 this time, which is alright, but don’t think I have all the rules intuitively in my head yet.
Not liking auf for storage media etc. Smells very ‘in’ to me especially after the whole “im Internet” from part 1 made so much sense. Isn’t an SD just a smaller internet? Also Deutschlandradio felt to me like “any radio station in Germany” and not an actual channel like “…Z104.5..kick ass rock and roll…” I’ll be doing this again for sure after so reviewing.
I thought the storage media would be an easy one because it’s the same in English (“on my harddrive etc”).
As for the radio stations…. I actually spend a good amount of time thinking which station to use. My initial plan was Jazzradio but that sounded too generic, though it’s an actual station. Then I was like NPR or BBC radio, but eventually I opted for Deutschlandradio. Did it tempt you to pick “in” because it sounds so generic?
Yes – for me (#ignorant) Deutschlandradio is a generic term “some radio station in Germany”. The same goes for “BBC” – aren’t there multiple BBC channels: BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, etc or is that just an Austin Powers song?
I guess “on my thumb drive” will be easy(ier) now but you taught me more than anyone that going from your native language into the preposition world/game only brings pain. :)
Hahahaha, yeah, I did say that. But that doesn’t mean that they’re ALWAYS different. Sometimes, usage lines up and you should cherrish these moments :)
So I guess “on” seems similar to “auf” to you?
For me, I know they’re similar sometimes (“auf dem Tisch“), but “auf” doesn’t really feel like the counterpart of “on.” Maybe it’s because of things like “auf jeden Fall” or “sich freuen auf etw.”
Like having a picture on your phone. If I didn’t know it’s “auf dem Handy / aufm Handy,” I’d probably guess “an”. Probably because they sound similar. Or maybe “in”, because the tendency to go “it’s gotta be a different preposition than English” is very real.
Well, I suppose I am coming at it from ‘auf der Hochzeit’ or ‘auf dem Flohmarkt’ and even ‘auf dem Bild’ and ‘auf dem Schild’ (from part 1 of this lesson). It is a process, and I am working through it. :)
Oh, I meant to reply to Emanuel. Sorry about that. I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for work and must not have looked close enough. I was just wondering what it seems like from German to English.
And yeah, learning prepositions is a process. I think it’s one of the hardest things to learn because there isn’t necessarily a logic or pattern to it. Just welp, that’s how it is, gotta learn it. And somehow the short words seem harder to remember.
I think I remember seeing a comment you wrote somewhere, maybe in the dictionary, about picturing a scene and going through different ways to describe it. I do that too and it’s extra fun (“fun”) with prepositions. Does someone knock “an die Tür” or “an der Tür”? Still not really sure which to use :)
Guess what… either works, but “tHeY mEaN dIfFeReNt ThInGs”
The focus is more on the “knocking device” (the hand) moving toward the door.
Someone is knocking somewhere, and the door is the location of the knocking.
Every native speaker will be hella confused if you mix those up.
(Kidding, the meaning is the same, just the vibe is a tiny little bit different.)
That’s really interesting to me!
“auf” feels like to absolute natural counterpart to “on” to me, but that might actually be my location-focused German brain. I do not associate “on” and “an” AT ALL, even though they both carry the sense of a device being active. But “an” to me is about the locational “an”. It’s this sense that dominates and the other one that prepositions might have is secondary.
But interesting to hear that for a native speaker of English, it seems to be different.
For me, both an and auf feel connected still to “on”, and for that reason I often mix up whether I should say auf or an. It doesn’t even have to do with the “active” sense as well: an der Wand, an der Tafel… an is still a locational “on” in English too
Such trouble for me
It’s useful info like this that makes your site so essential! Thanks!!
Sorry to hear you haven‘t been well, Emanuel. Wishing you a full and speedy recovery.