German Local Prepositions – Practice Tool

Welcome to my online practice tool for German local prepositions. 

With this trainer, you can practice the prepositions you need to talk about where you are, where you’re going and where you’re coming from. And you’ll discover the rules, special cases and exceptions as you go along.

Viel Spaß!

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Settings ▼

Categories

Basics Specials

Basics selected.

Direction

Wohin? Wo? Woher?

All three directions selected.

Difficulty

Super Easy Normal

Short, simple sentences (A1).

Input mode

Multiple choice Speaking (members only)

Pick the right preposition from options.

Set size

10 15 (members only) 25 (members only) Open end (members only)

10 questions per set.

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Review mistakes

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Local Prepositions in German – A Quick Overview

There are loads of prepositions of location like under, behind, on top of, next to and so on. But those are not really the focus of the first version of the tool.

The first version of the tool is specifically about what we could call:

The Default Preposition

So you have a place, like a concert or a person’s home or the bathroom, and the question is which preposition do you need to go there, be there and come from there.

In German, there are kind of 2.5 schemes and then a bunch of side rules or exceptions.
The main two schemes are:

1. locations you enter
2. locations you don’t enter

Locations you enter are of course all kinds of buildings, but also things like parks, forests and vehicles or planes.

Locations you DON’T enter are people, and by extension all places that are referred to via people or even that are just names.
You do enter a doctor’s office, but when you say, you go “to the doctor”, you refer to the location via a person, so that would be a location you don’t enter. And same for something like McDonald’s or Lidl. Yes, they’re venues, yes, you technically go inside, but when you refer to them by name, you treat them like people.
Oh and also activities like Yoga or services like a massage do fall into this group.

So those are the two main groups and the prepositions we need are:

• destination (wohin) – location (wo) – origin (woher)
• in (Acc) – in (Dat) – aus
• zu  – bei  – von

As you can see, in the first group, we use in twice, but with different cases. That’s because in is a Two-Way Preposition and the case that follows it depends on whether you talk about a destination or a current location . In English, you can ask for both using where? so if you’re having trouble telling what you’re looking at, you can use this test:

• To what place? = Destination
• At what place? = current location

Destinations are marked by Accusative, current locations are marked by Dative.
The other prepositions in the scheme (zu, aus, bei) all go with Dative all the time, so no distinction there.

Cool, so those are the two basic schemes, let’s call it in-scheme and zu-scheme.
Now, the 0.5 is for countries and other named geographical regions.
Those are generally considered places you can enter BUT, you use nach for the destination, instead of in.

• nach Berlin – in Berlin – aus Berlin

EXCEPT, when the region or country has an article as part of its name. Then, you do use the normal in-scheme.

• in die Schweiz – in der Schweiz – aus der Schweiz

If you’re now like “OMG, I don’t even know which countries have an article!” then don’t worry. That’s part of the drill and it’s only a few.

All right.
So these are the basic schemes, and then, beyond that, there are a few subgroups or singular entities.

Beaches and shores for instance usually go with:

an (Acc) – an/am (Dat) – von

And there are more of these side triplets, but I actually DON’T want to list them here because that’s boring and the drill will always tell you the pattern or rule along with the answer.

Instead, I’ll just give you a chart I have made back in the day when the iPhone was still new and I was more into photography. I tried to capture the most important places and their prepositions.

(click to see full size, opens in new window)

All right.

Like I said, I’m overdue with the actual lesson series about this stuff, but it’ll come.
Now, let’s go to the drill tool.

Location Practice Tool – Explanation

When I started working on this, I thought it’d be a breeze. A couple of core schemes, a few side schemes. Simple. However, it turned out less easy than I thought because with many places actually two schemes work and sometimes there’s a difference and sometimes there isn’t.

It’s not always clear

What I DIDN’T want is to teach you a place goes with ‘in’ and then you keep seeing it with ‘zu’ in daily life. But I ALSO didn’t want you to pick in when the question “expected” zu, and you’d get a mistake when in reality both options are correct. That’s super duper frustrating.
And a DEFINITELY don’t want to rely on AI to handle these distinctions because … well… it doesn’t do well.

So yeah, I ended up restructuring my data completely and now, often two answers are correct and the explainer will tell you that both are possible.
Generally, places that work with the in-scheme (in – in – aus) can also be used with zu-scheme (zu – bei – von). Same for when you talk about directions to a place. Then, zu is the better way to go. Like in the cartoon. The duck wants to go an den Strand but since it’s a sign, it says zum Strand, because that’s an indication of direction.

I have decided to not micro-optimize this, because it would make it feel more complicated than it needs to be and it would make the entire thing AWFULLY error prone because I can’t rely on AI for these nuances.

The goal is to get a general feel for patterns, not covering every single nuance. 80-20 for the win here :)

I think in its current form, the tool is solid and should also handle the contractions well.. like am, vom, im and so on, though the stupid AI does glitch out here sometimes.

Typing mode vs Speaking Mode

I have NOT yet added a typing mode this time, partially because it would involve the gender and case endings and that kind of detracts from the core topic of the drill, that is associating the preposition with the location and sense of direction.
I DID however add a speaking mode. You’ll see the German sentence with the preposition missing and you have to speak the whole thing to reply.
This is of course peak practice, so if this works well here, I’ll add that to my other drill tools as well.

Other Features

As usual, you can pick your set length, you can pick which directions you want to focus on and if you want super bland boring basic sentences or some more normal ones.
Mistakes get repeated in intervals and you can always review your set again or extend it.
And I have divided the locations into a group of absolute basics and then a group of the more specific ones.

What the tool DOESN’T practice right now is two-way prepositions. I think it’s actually BETTER to not think about that and instead just associate contractions like am or im with fixed location and an den or in die with destinations.

This tool is meant as a DRILL, so you just cruise through it, until you answer automatically without thinking about schemes or two way prepositions or stuff like that.

Oh and one more thing… the “flag” feature only removes weird or faulty examples from YOUR set. I do not track any of this yet, so don’t worry about over-flagging. If you feel weird about an example, just remove it :)