Hello everyone,
And welcome to day two of this years Advent Calendar and today we’ll do a little quiz about
Truths about the German Language
Sounds harmless, but you’ll actually have to do some serious thinking. Or some serious knowing. Or some serious guessing. Either way, it’s definitely very serious.
Like… for real. You’re reading this thinking “Ah, I got it, it’s going to be some fun quiz.” but I’m not even kidding. It’s a tricky quiz.
What we’ll do is I’ll tell you three “facts” about the German language and you’ll have to decide whether that’s actually true or not.
And it’s not going to be something simple like “German has three genders” which is obviously not true.
It has four!
Most people don’t know about this, but it’s true. The reason most people including linguists don’t know this is that there simply isn’t a noun currently that actually has this gender. But hey, just because there’s no tiger in the forest doesn’t mean bears don’t exist, right?
So, mark my words. Do your own research. One day, the noun with the 4th gender will show up and then all those linguists will look real stupid with their degrees.
Anyway… where was I… oh yeah, the quiz.
It’s a tricky quiz, so get ready to get at least one answer wrong. But however you do, you’ll definitely get angel number points for it, so that’s great.
And of course, I’ll give you an explanation along with each question, so you know what’s going on.
Cool.
So if you’re ready, I’d say… viel Spaß :)
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Und, wie lief’s?
How did you do? If you are still a beginner and failed at all of them, don’t worry. I’m sure many of the fluent B2 learners also walked away with 222 points or even 111.
Let me know how you did and if you enjoyed this type of format. I found this kind of fun actually, so if you liked it, I’ll do another one some time.
And of course, if you have any questions about any of the topics, please let me know in the comments and we can clear things up there.
And I’ll also leave a couple of links below if you want to explore some it in more depth.
So yeah… I hope you enjoyed this, have a great day and wir sehen uns morgen.
Further reading:
- Order of Adjectives in German
(an older Advent Calendar entry about the topic) - German Passive Voice Quirks
(one part looks at subjectless passive voice in detail)
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Finally , got a chance to get back to learning. This is a eye-opener and a good look into German grammar. Keep these quizzes coming!
Willkommen zurueck!!
For question 3, I was thinking about the helping verbs (haben and sein) also needing to be moved from their normal second position when using past perfekt. I got it right, but it didn’t feel like that where this was leading us.
Ah, yeah, that makes sense. What I meant was “the verb from position 2”, regardless of whether it’s a normal one or a helper or a modal.
Yes, it was fun. A I did 111, only one out of three.
That’s fine, the goal here is not “knowing” but “learning” :)
I got 3/3, but guessed on the adjective order one based on never having heard anything about adjective order despite order on adverbs being such a discussion. For the one on subordinate clauses, I hadn’t learned this but moving around the order sounded so weird I concluded there must be something there.
I did seriously guess on the first two (which I missed) but on the third, I knew side sentences (subordinate clauses?) have a strict order too. I was surprised to learn there’s no adjective order in German. I know there is in English!
Also, in English, when we use passive voice and say there’s no subject, there still is one: but it’s not the actor of that sentence. We’d say “Hier” is the subject in the case of your sample sentence.
Camille
English teacher, German learner :)
who is…tatsächlich gestern für 10 Tagen in Deutschland angekommen. YAY!!!
Oh, super, dann genieß deine Zeit hier und teste deine Skills :)
Danke schön!!! (Ich bin in Frankfurt, oder ich werde dir für ein Kaffee anrufen! haha!)
Danke Camille! Dass wollte ich genau fragen and bestätigen. “Heir” (oder “kalt” im ersten Satz) ist das Subjekt in dem englischen Satz. Emanuel, sind sie wirklich auch nicht Nominativ oder Subjekts auf deutsch?
Nein, sie sind Teil vom Prädikat.
– Mir graut vor der Prüfung.
Hier hast du zum Beispiel nur ein Präpositionalobjekt mit Dativ und einen Dativ.
Ja! das war interessant. Danke.
Another that can be mentioned about subordinate clauses. Separable verbs come back together. True, the verb has gone to the end, but the prefix is reconnected to the verb rather than standing separate.
“Ich schalte es ein.”
“, dass ich es einschalte.”
Yup, it’s like there’s some sort of gravity or magnetism that pulls them together.
They are fighting over last position, so they agree to compromise and share it.
Oh, no, it’s not a fight. They form a line like good Germans :).
hahahaha
First two were easy … but I got the last one right with a semi educated guess. :-D
Hallo Emanuel you missed my comment on last post. Please reply !!!!
I’ve reached the B2 level finallyyy, and 3 months have already passed.
I’m an indian whose mother tongue is Hindi. Learned English as a secondary language. Now doing German out of my own willingness. To some extent, I’m doing fine with this language- grammar and listening, but while speaking and writing I’m facing problems. It’s like during writing or speaking 2 sides of my brain combine- Hindi side and English side. As a result, I fail to speak or write fluently.
Every day I listen to podcasts, watch cartoons, and news. learning verbs 50 per day. still its not working kinda broken German it feels when I speak or write.
I’m not sure how I can help with that here, to be honest. I don’t have this background of having to very different languages competing in my head and “speaking in” over a third language I am trying to learn.
One thing I’ll say is that I do NOT think your problem with writing and speaking is a lack of vocabulary. You should be okay for normal everyday things if you passed B1.
my recommendation would be that you write a short paragraph every day. half a page. Not looking up rules, but taking your time.
Then, you put it aside for a night or two and then you read it again after a day or two. You WILL notice quite a few mistakes yourself.
THEN, you put it into ChatGPT or whichever AI and have it correct you. Tell it to JUST correct mistakes and not improve style too much. And then you can ask it about rules and pointers. It’s not 100% reliable of course, but it’s a good starting point.
The key thing is… YOU will recognize quite a few mistakes yourself, if you put some distance between the act of writing and the act of reading it again. And this will make you improve over time.
My German wasn’t up to the test, but I like the way it made me think. Sometimes I think I’m just in it for the grammar (I was the kid who diagrammed complicated English sentences on the blackboard for fun).
In the sentence mir ist kalt, is “es” the UNDERSTOOD subject?
I was awaiting that question :).
The answer is “not really”. You CAN put in an “es” and say “Mir ist es kalt” but that sounds old fashioned to me. The sentence does NOT feel like a shortened version of something.
And in a sentence like “Mir ist langweilig.”, adding an “es” can change the meaning and sound like something specific (it) is boring to you, when in fact, you’re just generally bored.
Ich habe 333 erreicht, trotz Deutsch Grammatik-Unfähigkeit, es wirkt ( danke dir)mir einfach gesunder Menschenverstand.
Oh, top!!
Aber meinst du mit “es wirkt mir einfach gesunder Menschenverstand” den Satz “It seems like common sense”?
Jawohl.
As always, thought provoking. There are some adjective phrases that are in an informal order, like “a big blue balloon”.
While not wrong, saying “a blue big balloon” wouldn’t be what I would normally say, at least not at first. Perhaps with a little hesitation in the speaking “a blue… big balloon” when the thought that it’s also big comes to mind mid-sentence.
Since German and English are closely related I’d think there’d be some similar German adjective “riffs”.
Vielen Dank!
oh, and I got the 3rd question wrong. I consider myself B1, working on B2.
I got 2 out of 3 right. It was a bit of fun – I do like your quizzes.
Hallo,
Do let me know if you’d like typo corrections on the advent calendar, as I’m not sure if you have the time or think it’s worth going over the articles :)
I’m shocked, my angel number was 333!!!
Bis bald!
333 steht für “Unterstützung und Führung durch aufgestiegene Meister und Engel”. So toll!!
Ja, gerne Korrekturen, aber nur wenn du selber auch Bock hast. Ich hoffe, es sind nicht zu viele.
For question two, I’m curious about those rules for adjective word order in English. To me, there is no rule in English that would dictate word order for the four adjectives you chose. We have what I would call an aesthetic tendency to put adjectives in an order that “sounds right,“ but I’ve never heard of a rule. We also have set phrases, like “big, fat” and it would sound really weird to say “ fat, big.” I think of that as a convention for that specific phrase, rather than a rule. Clue me in if you know of a rule!
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order
Basically, adjectives usually follow this order:
opinion, size, physical quality, shape, age, colour, origin, material, type, purpose. (So “purpose” is nearest to the noun.)
Here is an example: What an amazing, little, old, Chinese cup and saucer!
If this order is changed, it sounds really weird! The Chinese, amazing, old, little cup and saucer just doesn’t sound right at all.
Thanks for this! I’m not an English native speaker so I can’t really tell how serious a rule this is, but when I found out about it (after YEARS of speaking English), it felt like it’s definitely a thing.
Hey, I just found out about this “rule” of English when I started to re-learn German, and I’ve been a native English speaker for 70+ years! In fact, I suspect the rules are looser in US English than British English. We certainly were never told that there’s a standard order for adjectives. Maybe it was assumed (passive there) that as kids we would pick up the order by osmosis. But in fact, your example of “rich, fast, contumacious, fat horse ” really sounds fine to me. Take out “contumacious” which is just a distraction, and even rich, fast, fat horse sounds fine – the emphasis being on the horse’s wealth. The fat, fast, rich horse or fat, rich, fast horse would sound okay as well. It’s just what you want to emphasize. Yes, there are some combinations of adjectives that would not work, but I think you can violate that “rule” liberally and still not sound like a non-native in the US. Hmm, that may be why Greater-Former-Commonwealth English sometimes sounds stilted to us in the States.
Thank you for this! I’m a native speaker, so I guess I’ve just learned by ear to follow this rule automatically; it was certainly never actively taught. It’s fascinating to me, after many decades of not only being a native speaker, but studying the language and using it professionally (writer and editor), to find out that there is a grammar rule I’ve never heard of. I’m flabbergasted. But, having unconsciously learned the rule as a native, I’m happy that non-native speakers have a written rule to help.
I mean, “grammar rule” always feels a little exaggerated to me (the adjective-order thing in English), but yeah, it’s a really strong preference/tendency.
Still, just thinking about the cup and saucer thing… “Amazing little old Chinese” sounds right, but depending on what you swap in for different things, I don’t think I’d prefer the same conceptual order.
To me “amazing new little Chinese” sounds at least as good as “amazing little new Chinese.” That’s probably down to the vowel-sound order preferences we have in English (which German has at least to some degree as well – see “Pipapo”).
The underlying rule is that whatever is perceived (by the speaker or writer) as most essential to the identity or character of the thing/person described goes closest to the noun. Or to put it another way, “what kind” belongs closer than “of what qualities.” That’s why origin, material, and purpose are last and evaluation words are always first.
This is a good explanation.
“The underlying rule is that whatever is perceived (by the speaker or writer) as most essential to the identity or character of the thing/person described goes closest to the noun. Or to put it another way, “what kind” belongs closer than “of what qualities.” That’s why origin, material, and purpose are last and evaluation words are always first.”
This is a very elegant explanation, and ALMOST convinces me – thank you! But the key is that it depends on what you want to express, and frequently, if the importance of the various signifiers is pretty much equal, a native speaker is as likely to violate that rule as not – with a bunch of exceptions, like cardinal and ordinal numbers pretty much always coming first. [Disclaimer: I am not a linguist.]
Oh sure! It’s a common theme here w/r/t German (obviously) that if you take “rule” to mean “it will always be like this,” you’ll end up banging your head against the wall over exceptions all the time.
What I’m trying to get at is how to account for a strong basic tendency that people have noticed. But it’s really pretty rare for anyone to just rattle off a long sequence of adjectives in conversation anyway, and as you say, if someone is doing that, they might certainly mix up the order either by “mistake” (just saying things as they come to mind) or intentionally, to highlight something as particularly important. Both are deviations from a default, but they don’t break some absolute “rule.”
That said, I think it’s precisely when “the importance of the various signifiers is pretty much equal” that the “rule” seems most clear. It’s just what you fall back on by default, a basic sense of what feels most essential vs. most accidental.
Just to get into the grammatical weeds here: technically, you should only use commas between adjectives that belong to the same “level.” For example, you separate two adjectives with commas if they’re both related to quality, or if they both have to do with purpose. But when the adjectives are different “levels,” no comma between them.
So you’d say:
What an amazing, stupendous, awe-inspiring cup and saucer!
But when the adjectives are different levels:
What an amazing little old Chinese cup and saucer!
And a mixed sentence (I think this is right):
What a delightful, stupendous little old Chinese cup and saucer!
The same rule goes for whether you can put “and” between two adjectives: if they’re of the same level, you can; if they’re different levels, it’s forbidden.
So:
What an amazing and stupendous cup and saucer!
But NOT:
What an amazing and little cup and saucer!
I don’t mean to be a stickler about this; I just want to make sure the people who care about the useless information have access to it. :)
In German, we have something similar, but different.
If we consider the adjectives “stacked”, then they get separated by commas.
– eine große, grüne Tasse
We have a cup that’s big and green.
If we consider one adjective to be a determiner for an object that itself is definied by the noun and an adjective (not stacked), then no comma.
– eine große grüne Tasse.
A green cup that is big.
But it doesn’t matter what type of adjective it is.
This is of course VERY wishy washy and subjective, but it can make a difference for instance if you have two green cups and one is big and the other one small.
– Die große grüne Tasse, oder die kleine grüne Tasse.
Using commas here would be a bit weird.
Emanuel, if you haven’t yet done a post on the use of commas, not only between adjectives, but also between phrases and sentence fragments, please do! I know I sometimes add commas where Germans wouldn’t, and leave some out as well. (Beware of the “Oxford comma” controversy in English, however.)
I do have one article so far (part 2 is still pending):
https://yourdailygerman.com/commas-in-german/
Viel merci!
I think we’re conflating British grammar and American grammar here. As a native American English speaker, I believe there is an aesthetic sense of adjective order, but no rule, as far as I know.
Yes.
I mean, the “rule” is really just an attempt to describe what works and what sounds weird or wrong to native speakers. I didn’t mean “rule” as a imposed rule, but just an attempt to describe what’s there (and for learners that of course then takes the shape of a rule).
333! Ich habe viel darüber nachgedacht, aber ich glaube, ich hatte Glück. Leider konnte ich nicht erzählen, ob du the-4-genders ehrlich oder nicht. Echt! Ich habe Angst nun dafür und auch für Bären und Löwen! Und heute ist nun erst der zweite Tag!
Sagen wir mal so… keiner kann beweisen, dass es nicht irgendwann ein Nomen mit einem 4. Gender gibt, insofern kann mich keiner widerlegen ;).
Ich bin mir sicher, dass der Teekanne, die für immer um die Sonne fliegst, ein Objekt dieses fast unbekannten Geschlechts enthählt. Vielleicht sogar *zwei* solcher Objekte.
(( Anyone silenty saying “*die* Teekanne” while reading the second clause… I hear you, I hear you: another classic case of changing the noun (Teekessel => Teekanne) but neglecting to change one of the associated articles.
Still preferable to my trademark means of self-sabotage while speaking: neglecting to conjugate the verb at the end of a subordinate clause! ))
I was going to make the comment that if there were TWO such objects in the teapot, then that makes plural and thus “die” works :) As for me, I like to just OMIT the verb at the end regardless of conjugation. That really makes me sound native. In my mind, it has already been thought of…
Imma press F for doubt on that :D
Aaah, nice idea foiled (it seems) by that old “reality” bugbear. Reminds me a little of the suggestion to always deploy a modal verb (these beasties conjugate so nicely!) –or its KII counterpart– when you have any doubts about how to deal with complications such as conjugating the main verb, or worrying whether or not it’s separable. Everything just gets smooshed into/onto that helper verb, and the glorious infinitive can stand proud, strong and unmangled at the end of the clause.
(Wie durch Zauberei!)
The thing about omitting the verb at the end is not so much that no one would understand. Like Bissel said, you often KNOW what’s there from context. Maybe not the precise verb, but the “group”.
The thing is that Germans really want this feeling of closure.
It’s like when you listen to classical music of the Mozart or Bach era where they always have the same boring type of ending cadence. You know it’s coming, it’s not interesting musically, but if it’s NOT there… OMG it’s so unbelievably unsatisfying.
I kind of like the idea of using modals or würde to avoid conjugating the main verb. Perfect example for verschlimmbessern :D.
If you (Emanuel) have never seen Amadeus, there is a moment early in the film where Saliere plays a dominant seven 7 with a real obvious leading tone and DOESN’T resolve it for the preist who has come to see him. My wife always sings the ‘do’ note as the non-resolution drives her mad.
“neglecting to conjugate the verb at the end of a subordinate clause! ))”
Yeah… that does sound really shitty. Much worse than getting an article wrong. So you just end with the infinitive?
Yeah, exactly that: it only happens relatively rarely, Gott sei Dank, but gnaws away at my soul when it does. Unsurprisingly it’s correlated with inattentiveness, and also becomes more frequent as the complexity of the clause involved. I seem to lose track of the little mental marker about the nature of the subject, or perhaps conflate the sense that I’m closing out a subordinate clause rather than a standard sentence, and that infinitive is just *so accessible* (and correct for a standard sentence, or when I’m speaking formally, or…)!
But hey, like lots of things, maybe letting it see the light of day is the first step to stamping it out once and for all…
BS-Wörter wie „Adjektivreihungsfreiheitrahmenverordnung” verwandeln mich in einen blauen, kleinen, halbnackten, mürrischen Schlumpfine. ;p (333)
Always love the quiz format b/c it’s fun and your explanations are awesome! Super useful learning tool! Thank you!!
I could have sworn there was an adjective order, but not necessarily the same as English. But that wasn’t a choice. Oh well. And I didn’t really know there was one in English. Keep it coming.