Hello everyone,
And welcome back to “Practicanuary”. The whole of January (and maybe also a little of February), we’ll do a series of quizzes for various topics.
The very first one was about how to use the word lieber to express preference
(find it here).
Then we had a fun one about some nice German expressions
(you can find it here).
And today, things are getting real, because today, we’ll take a first jab at a topic that has low key frustrated every German learner at some point.
Locations and their prepositions in German
Talking about location is one of those topics that I have yet to cover, and I actually hope to get to it this year.
But today, we’ll start with a nice juicy quiz about it. And not just a quiz.
It’s a quiz with benefits.
A quizplanation, if you will.
Because along with the answers I’ll also give you some short pieces of information about rules or usage patterns.
Each question is a German sentence about location and you’ll have to pick the right preposition to use. It’s 18 questions in total and I’m going through different contexts, including virtual locations like an email or the internet.
This quiz pretty much covers the basics, and we’ll do a second one later this month where we’ll go over all the exceptions or special cases like being at a party or at the cashier and other stuff like that.
But yeah, we have to have the basics down before we “clutter the brain”, so to speak :).
Unless you’re absolutely crushing this exercise, I would recommend doing it at least twice. Better yet, three times, with a couple of days in between. It’s for learning, after all. Not for acing it.
Anyway, without further ado… viel Spaß :)
As always, let me know in the comments how you did and if you have any questions about any of these or some other type of location.
I really hope you enjoyed this and learned a little. Have a great day and I’ll see you soon with the next one.
Bis dann!
further reading:
Btw… here’s a hidden gem most of you probably have not seen yet. It needs a do over, but it has a LOT of information on it :)
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Sorry, I already red that´s this question was already in the comments!! sorry
I am a member and am getting blocked and can not get to the January work. I did not receive any of these and when I was trying to do the 2nd location quiz I saw that I should go to the first one and now I can’t access it. I am quite disappointed…I also can’t get the other ones in January. Help!
HI wallisgreen, your account says that you don’t have an active membership at the moment. It expired in December. If you did renew since then, please send me an email, so I can look into what went wrong.
My embarrassing 11/18 might have been even lower had not some of the questions given the answer away because there was a definite article after the mystery preposition, z.B. “in” wouldn’t be correct if the article given was “dem”..”Ich gehe ____die Bar” is a good example. If you want to be really devilish, you could have people provide both preposition AND article – even if you tell us the gender, i.e. M,N, F. But now I have to bookmark this to keep practicing! Great challenge!
Ha, yeah I’m really trying to keep “learning fields” separate. So when you learn “prepositions” then you DON’T think about gender as well.
Nice that you caught those things as a hint though. Not everyone picks up on that for sure!
woah 14/18 on the first try, I guess after 3 years of trying to learn German some of it is sticking and I’m getting a better feel/instinct for prepositions (probably should be even higher given I kept guessing incorrectly the easy questions that followed explanations of the same format but I got paranoid it was a trick), still, it’s GREAT to have these little explanations, definitely why I keep coming back to YDG (along with jokes like the Erdogan one, sehr lustig)
I would like to thank Emanuel and all the members who pay a little more and thus allow others to become members. I’m excited to start taking advantage of everything the blog can offer and improve my German.
As mentioned, I loved this. But…I was finally making some flash cards, and checking them with DeepL / Langotalk et al. They really want VON in the sentence “Ich fahre aus/von Houston zurück”. Even “Ich fliege von Houston aus”. So what magical exception did I run into this time? It is only if I use komme in the sentence, does AI then find aus to be acceptable as its number 1 preposition choice, but it wants von for many of the ways one would be coming from a city.
It’s a more general “exception” that we could call “from A to B”.
If you describe a journey from A to B, then the standard way to say it is “von A nach B”.
The example with Houson is an edge case here because “zurück” takes the role of the destination. But “aus” wouldn’t sound wrong to me either, here.
As for “von… aus”, I have an article for that :)
https://yourdailygerman.com/von-mir-aus-meaning/
New YDG slogan “There’s an article for that…” :) Danke!
Really enjoyed the quiz. A great way to learn that sticks. Your explanations were nice and to the point as well. More like this please!!
Hi all–just wanted to say thank you to those who pay extra to sponsor memberships. I recently moved from the US to Germany to be with my kids, but I lost the US job I thought I could maintain abroad. I’m now trying to quickly become fluent in German to help me find work here, but my current unemployment prevented me from paying for a Daily German membership. But thanks to the kind community members here who pay extra to help others join, I’m in! Thank you all a lot; it’s a huge help to me. And thank you for all the terrific resources you create, Emanuel! I’m learning more here than I have from all the German textbooks I’ve ever read.
Love this! Super helpful to get a grasp of these prepositions which you rightly assumed irks and troubles me. Already better equipped with one pass through the quiz!
Thanks for the quiz, was fun!
A bit off the main topic, but why it is said „im Supermarkt” even if the specific one might not be clear?
Great question!
Never noticed that.
Think of “im Supermarkt” as a “generic location”, like “Ich bin einkaufen”.
10/18. Great Quiz! Thank you Emanuel. I’ll return to it later and check my memory:)
WOW! That feeling when you suddenly discover a whole new world of complexity in something you thought you knew. Exciting and daunting both at once.
[For an example, Google “diphthong etym” and read it all.]
One oddity: why does motion use “in + dative”, location “in + accusative”?
In Latin it’s exactly the reverse? Dative means “to” or “for”. Indeed, doesn’t the word itself (Dative) refers to “Giving TO”?
Anyway, thanks a million.
Actually, for these two-way-prepositions, Dative is “fixed location – where?” and Accusative is “destination – whereto?”.
Did I accidentally reverse that in the quiz??
10/18. It was difficult, but glad that I got more than half of them right! I’ll definitely try again later, to see if anything has sunk in.
Thanks Emanuel and the team for giving me the membership for an year;)
Now I’ll learn and comment here and flex by German newbie knowledge.
Yeah, flexing is a great motivator :)!!
It would be helpful in learning how to use these prepositions, to be able to review previous answers while we are taking the test, rather than retesting after finishing it. Is that possible?
I can only show the “back”-button if the quiz is in “answer at the end mode”, but I have added a question overview where you can skip around freely. You might have to do a full reload to see it (ctrl+f5 on desktop).
Awesome! 11/18. I’ll try again later.
Really great quiz! I’m also really grateful to everybody in the German Learning community who have paid a little extra to allow for learners like me to access such good resources! Thank you so much! And thanks a lot Emanuel!
10 out of 18
Some of the ones I got wrong I should have known, some were new to me. I’ll come back and try again and see if I can do better!
Let me know how it went the second time around, and also if you have “sticky” mistakes.
Wow – did I suck!! 7 right first time. 12 the second. Loved it – thanks. Now I will study them. :)
So actually probably 13 correct, because I just found out I had marked one answer wrongly as correct. 13/18 is not so bad :)
Loved this. Going to do it again, and write some notes (but I will look at your cheat sheet first.). I want my point back in Q13 since you had both and said both would work in your explanation/answer (and since it closely mirrored the question before). But still, this is really good for me. Keep Quizanuary going!
Ops, my bad!! I marked the wrong answer in 13. I have changed it now, so now “both” will give you the point, as it should.