“Location Vocation”
***
Hallo ihr alle,
Advent Calendar day 10, time for you to get active again :).
Yes, it’s quiz time and today about a topic that makes everyone go like:
“Yaaaawn”:
Locational Adverbs
I mean these little words like links, hinten, hinter, oben, unten, runter, drunter and so on.
Because German has a lot of those words, and it’s got a bit of OCD about the whole topic.
Specifically, about making a distinction between “fixed location” and “direction”.
Like… hinten is a fixed location. hinter is the same location, but as a direction.
I’ve talked a little bit about this in my article about hinter vs hinten and also in the article about hin (links below). But have not done an organized series on location yet. That’s high up on my to-do list, and will probably come next year.
But anyway, today, we’ll do a little quiz about the topic.
The core idea is basically, that I’ll give you a bunch of location words and you’ll have to pick out the one that does not fit in with the others.
Especially, if you’re a beginner, this quiz might be a bit of a challenge. And even for advanced learners it’s not necessarily a walk in the park, unless they have specifically looked into this stuff.
I have added a quick explainer for each answer and there’s actually lowkey a progression to the whole quiz, but by no means extensive.
More like a good way to check how much you didn’t know that you don’t know.
What a confusing sentence :).
Perfect translation to a confusing quiz, also… viel Spaß!
So… how did it go?
I really hope this wasn’t too difficult or frustrating. If you did poorly, please don’t beat yourself up over it. There was virtually no explanation before and the stuff can be hella confusing, especially if these words just kind of sit next to each other.
Still, I hope my explanations could clear things up a little and I’d recommend taking the quiz again, just to see if you can improve.
Anyway, let me know how you did and if you’d like more quizzes about this area. And if you have any questions, please let me know as well and I’ll try my best to clear things up.
Ansonsten, habt einen schönen Tag und bis morgen.
Further reading:
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Definitely exposed big weakness here.
I am ashamed! I missed four, one of them because I mistakenly thought I was at “Finish quiz.”
I’ve recently felt like this area is maybe THE biggest weakness in my german so I’m happy its covered. I mean, I did fine on the quiz (got one wrong first time round) but i’m not so confident actually with this stuff when it comes to day to day conversations in german.
So cool its covered. Maybe it could be covered more expansively / intensively. I feel like some kind of all encompassing diagram could really help actually.
But yeah, thanks for the article.
Nice idea for the diagram. I’ll do some brainstorming if there’s a good way to boil things down in some way. I’m also due to finally write my series on “location”. Lots of thoughts to organize there.
Wow. I felt like I knew…but nope! I think ‘vor’ was über tricky since vor _______ is a location. But I have a request….please give ‘low key’ no traction and let it die. I feel that in English we have sooooo many other ways of modifying/softening sentences, it is unneeded. In fact, LOWKEY is often used in conjunction with other ‘softeners’ and so the sentence sounds more like an apology than a statement. “This is kind of like lowkey freaking me out”. How about change the phrase freaking me out to be softer. I mean — “I lowkey murdered their cat”. What would that mean? It is above but won’t walk again? So now, your example: “and there’s actually lowkey a progression to the whole quiz” No. There is a progression to the quiz and it was lovely. Nothing lowkey about it highkey. Many better words to use. Subtle, Gentle, Modest, Thematic. Overarching. Flowing. LOWKEY really feels like someone lost their mind in HTML. I <EM>really</EM> think that she <LOWKEY> loves </LOWKEY> him too much. I admit that I do actually get English slang from YDG first, before anyplace else. But please lead the rest of the world to stop using it highkey before it is too late doublehighkey.
I think you should chill dude and go with the flow. I think Emanuel should be Emanuel, and I also think you are overreacting. I am here to learn German concepts and found YDG through an internet search. I knew it was good from first glance and it complements other learning methods I have or am using. Even other German teachers know about and recommend YDG – sometime after that first time finding YDG, I saw Emanuel and YDG mentioned on YourGermanTeacher YouTube Channel as a reference/resource. I am a subscriber here now.
If he needs to chill, you need to chill too ;).
Seriously, Bissell is a long term reader and I feel a bit protective. He does know my style.
I really don’t mind if people tell me their opinions about how I write. Sometimes, I take the advise (for instance not using the f-word and “Jesus”), and some other times, I don’t (like using “God” or not making jokes in the articles), but it’s always good to have feedback.
It’s also nice to hear opposite opinions and it’s nice if people run defense for me, but generally, please don’t bark at each other in the comments. Not that you were doing that, but while reading it, I was like “Ohhh, shots fired”.
I’m just so conditioned to get aggrevated by lines online these days and I think I’m not the only one. And I really don’t want anyone to walk away from a comment section with negative energy.
I think that’s mainly why I am writing this. Bissells comment was fine, yours was fine, and here I am smearing a big layer of smooth cream just to be extra safe :)
Be careful with advise and advice. Advise is a verb – you can’t take it. Advice is a noun.
That will teach me to read the rest of the comments first.
Regarding “I take the advise..” above. Advise is the verb, advice is the noun. You’re practically perfect. Just a few rough edges.
I’m sure I’ll keep mixing these up. I am currently at the stage where I make a conscious effort to get it right and end up doing it wrong because I change what I had naturally typed.
I’m going to have to side with the (low key) “low key” likers here, even if it’s having a moment right now. Well, I’m at least neutral about its usage: I’m tempted to say that at this stage it’s just a near-synonym for “kinda/sorta/a_bit”.
To be honest I’m pretty much on board with anything that potentially stamps out an occurrence of the word “like” from a spoken sentence. That one –when inserted into sentences like bullets fired from a machine gun, as it so often is in conversations between teens– really gets my goat.
L like OL, I was like just like writing the same.
Like is really impressive. It’s been annoying 20 years ago and it still is. And learners of English still pick it up and think it’s “cool”.
I’ve like heard like some German like speaking English like literally like I am like writing this sentence.
It just won’t go away.
Honestly, aren’t you happy that there’s a bit less “kinda like” around :)? It’s so pervasive. I think that might subconsciouly be a reason why I am using “low key”, because it’s just nice and new.
Also “there’s low key a progression”, to my mind at least, is not the same as “subtle, gentle, modest”. Those describe the progression, while “low key” the way I meant it, modifies “to be”. So there was the intent of having a progression while making the quiz, and the intent has actualized itself to a degree, but I never actually planned a progression. It’s kind of there, but not really.
I never espoused prolonged or additional use of like or kinda. Nor would I. But let’s not forget that ‘kinda’ used to be kind of, which works as does sort of. You want the focus to be on the ‘being’ of the progression. How about ‘somewhat’. “There is somewhat of a progression to the questions. I do think that “There is a subtle/gentle progression” implies the state of the progression as it exists. To me, it doesn’t feel like it is a property added on. The subtle progression exists, or it doesn’t.
He is kind of dead. He is like dead (it’s funnier with ellipses “he is like…dead”) He is lowkey dead. None of this works IMHO to modify ‘to be…or not to be’. Anyway, I personally felt the progression from question 2 or 3 and dug it. It is there in a pretty obvious way – scripted or improvised. This topic really kicked the reader’s butt from the comments.
You can test the relations by chunking things up: “somewhat of a progression” is a unit, so the “somewhat” modifies the progression.
“there low key/kina sorta is a progression”… here, “low-key/kinda sorta is” form a chunk.
Not trying to talk you into liking “low-key” :). I just find it interesting to analyze these kinds of things.
Interesting. “Somewhat of a progression” is a unit… I don’t hear it or feel in that way. In fact, a I visualize ‘the progression’ as an object, it starts to fade and break apart in my mind’s eye. It is no longer whole. It is becoming ether. Interesting. I think I will never say lowkey as I just can’t hear it. Too old probably. When I see it written, I have to re (re) read the sentence again to make heads or tails out of it.
On another note, the English word of the year 2024 was “Polarization” which I feel is a decade beyond its true rise in the lexicon. Hoping the German word is more on point. Then again, if it ends up being lowkey…. :)
Word of the year is “Ampel-Aus”, relating to the recent and long flirted with end of the governing coalition. It was called Ampel because the colors of the parties are red yellow and green.
At the moment, we basically have a Fussgängerampel (red, green), which I personally think is more beneficial to normal people. Oh, the analogies :).
As for “somewhat of a progression” – I do not want to contest your perception of it, but grammatically, it has to be a unit, otherwise “somewhat” doesn’t mean anything.
– There is somewhat in it.
This doesn’t make sense, and that indicates that “somewhat” in this sentence is not complete.
Ich habe 4 von 5 bestanden.
It is possible to get the question with the 4 r words correct for the wrong reason. (I chose the right answer for the right reason. )
Guessing strategies for if you do not know the r word answer:
Starting letter: All start with rSyllables: Two have two syllables, two have oneOnly rechts does not have a “u” in the 2nd position <- must be correct, lol
Ha, I am trying to avoid these kinds of secondary effects, but I don’t put too much effort into it because once you start actually trying to make them all uncorrelated in all respects but one, it’s near impossible :)
I only got one right; I found these to be very tricky.
I only got one right; I found these to be very tricky.
I would very much like to know where you got the beautiful pictures. I am an animal lover and I especially liked the picture today with the animals enjoying each others company. As for the quiz…..well I learned somethings that didn’t know that i didn’t know
I am making them with ChatGPT. It’s tedious at times, but still, it allows me to be creative. I can’t pay a proper artist to do something custom like this.
As we are talking ai I kind of am anticipating the animals in the pictures hit the gym and get extremely muscly at some point.
Swole-icorn and roid rage squirrel are not happening in this series.
However:
lol, sehr schönes Bild.
I am still learning directions and this has been baffling to me. I got 1 right finally at the end. I love these quizzes.
Try and take it again in a couple of days to see how much you recall :)
This is how one of the questions looks. I’m viewing it from my pc using google chrome, but it shows the same way also from my android’s chrome
I clearly need a lesson on these words. I got 0 right. Also many letters were replaced by symbols, that was weird. But since Elsa didn’t claim them as spelling errors, I am assuming my computer just wigged out? rAb1/4ber ????
(the A had a tilda symbol but didn’t know how to type that)
Same here, but the letters are showing just fine in other articles.
Is it just in the quiz or in the comments too?
here’s a test:
ääää öööö üüüü
The quiz and the article, they show in the comments. Here’s what’s in the article:
Ansonsten, habt einen schönen Tag und bis morgen.
Perfect translation to a confusing quiz, also… viel Spaß!
Okay, great, now I see the same problem.
It’s the umlauts and “ß” not working properly. This is so unbelievably annoying. I am trying to work and then the site pulls some shit like this out of nowhere and I have to fix it because it’s not just this article, actually. Oh boy…
Having glitches out of nowhere like this is just, uggghhhh. I hope it’s not too much trouble to fix.
Today is a really bad day in this regard. I am spending it with endless admin emails and now this on top. Horrible!
After finishing up (or during working on it if it’s a lot of work), treat yourself to something. It can be a bad in this regard but it should not in every regard. :)
Good luck Emanuel, hope it turns out okay with minimal wasted energy.
working fine for me, Both Firefox on Iphone and firefox on Ubuntu. For once firefox is not the problem it seems…
It was an issue with the server cache software update of yesterday. I rolled it back and told them about it.
I had the same happen on two questions, which made them unintelligible…
Could you tell me your device and browser?
Nah, it looks completely fine on my computer. How did you access this quiz on mobile or desktop or apple, and with which browser?
Das ist ein gutes Quiz, und ich habe eine Frage dazu. Bei der zweiten Frage, es steht “The other three are fixed locations. In order to use them as a direction, we’d have to add “nach”. Können wir jedoch nicht ‚rechts‘ ohne ‚nach‘ als eine Richtung verwenden, z.b. im Satz „Du musst rechts abbiegen“?
Yes, good catch. In this example, “rechts” is the location where the turning happens, and the “ab” indicates the direction.
– Wohin muss ich abbiegen?
– (Nach) rechts.
This of that as a niche use/exception. Something like “Ich fahre rechts.” sounds like you’re on the right lane and not that you’re going TO the right line.
Did I miss the links you mentioned? I think as a very beginner I should maybe learn the basics before I try the quiz. I hope that’s not cheating! I’m looking forward to being able to take the quiz, though, because the quizzes do seem to pull things together and find weak spots.
Forgot to add them. Absolute classic :)
I have added three now, and I recommend all of them, maybe starting with “r-versions”
Ha! I did terribly at this. Clearly need more work in this area. Good to know.
I missed the first one, but the explanation there helped me work through the others. Very useful!
This is really the type of good stuff/awesomeness/$#€%<!!! that seeps in after living in a native place.
I remember when a kind Grazer Kumpel stood in our dorm stairwell attempting to explain the various way to go up, come down, usw. He was so patient, bless his Herz.
I was ready to hurl myself down the Treppenhaus, but luckily I was already on floor 0.
We ended up going for some weird pizza.
Hallo,
Only one typo:
“todo list” (to-do list)
Challenging quiz, had fun doing it and only failed the last one :)))
Bis morgen!
True, but the language is changing. “Todo list”, “At logon, …”, “after bootup”, oozing gently out of the USA into the world!
Emmanuel, please keep the examples coming, even if it’s tedious for the experts. Like: vor can’t indicate a direction by itself … needs an example.
Brilliant quiz. Love this Advent Calendar.
All right, here you go:
– Wo bist du?
– Vor!.. NOPE
– Wo bist du?
– Vorne!… Yes!
very good quiz Emanuel – yes, tricky! 60% first time through, then 100% on the retake! But that‘s easy, because they’re already in short-term memory. Don‘t know that I‘d be 100% after a month!