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Hello everyone,
and welcome to our German Word of the Day, this time with one of the most basic words ever, because today, we’ll talk about
The Different Types of “es”
And that’s really not as basic as it seems.
Yes, es means it.
That’s just the surface though.
Sooner or later, every German learner starts having questions about es. Why is it here? Why is it not here? Do we need it? What does it mean?
The thing is that there are actually 4 different types of es that you have to kind of recognize, and not all of them exist in English.
Today we’ll take a detailed look at all of that.
We’ll explore the different types and what es does, see how it compares to English and how it is translated (or not).
It’ll be nerdy, it’ll be long but I promise you, it’s worth it and at the end we’ll all be … es-perts.
Haha, man, my pun game is on point today.
Anyway, let’s jump right into it.
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Take that ChatGPT. This blog answered a question you couldn’t!
Lol, yeah, when it comes to German, I can answer a LOT of things ChatGPT can’t (and yes, it’s really me writing this comment).
Hi Emanuel. I have a problem with this tiny word where it’s replaced with articles or pronounes….sometimes I have no idea which one to choose for example:
Der Hauptgang war sehr schmackhaft.
Der erste Bissen hat mich wirklich umgehauen. Es / Er !? ( refering to the Hauptgang or the whole sentence) war eine perfekte Mischung aus/von
Gewürzen und Aromen.
Emanuel, you have no idea that how much your lessons help me….I feel guilty that I use your content for free at the time being ( the content that you have put great time and effort into it)….but honestly, I have back in my mind that I owe you at least 100$ and I’ll pay that once.
I wish you health& wealth
In this example, you pick “er” and it’ll be understood to refer to “Bissen”. “es” would be a bit confusing as there is no indication what it could be referring to.
Remember
December
In the quiz, question number 7:
Could this “es” also be a normal pronoun? Like, could this “es” refer to a “Mädchen” or some other das noun? (I guess with the meaning changing from “Someone called” to “Someone called her/it.)
If so, is it usually context then that distinguishes whether it is a “filler” es or a “normal pronoun” es?
Thanks in general for this and many more of your posts. The filler es is exactly why I came here and you seem to be the only person I can find on the web talking about these confusing/nuanced aspects of the German language.
Thanks for the great feedback and also great question.
So technically speaking, the answer is yes. “es” could refer to a Mädchen.
But in practice that’s not relevant because people tend to use “sie” for “Mädchen” in the subject role and if “jemand” is the subject, the people would say that first.
So there aren’t all that many contexts in which it’s really unclear.
Hallo Emanuel….
Ist diese Verwendung von “es” ein Beispiel für “rain-es”?
Auf den Sitzen hielt es die meisten zu keiner einzigen Minute
Danke!
Nice example!!
Yes, this is this very vague, abstract cirumstance-es. It’ll always be in the sentence, no matter what word order, so we can’t skip it. And it’s not “place-holding” or referring to anything else.
Emanuel,I thank You in advance for clarifying what use of ES Freud did when He created the concept of ID ( English for this Freudian ES ). )
Do you think he was influenced by how the word itself was/is used in daily life?
Hi Emanuel.
I have found the following sentence: es habe sich aber gelohnt und den Besitzer überzeugt dass er mehr ans Material beisteuerte als geplannt.
what is this “es habe”? I could not find an explanation anywhere.
That’s “Konjunktiv 1” of “haben”.
It’s used in writing for “reported speech”. The other is paraphrasing what someone else has said here and this is made immediately clear by this form.
Is this like the French use the conditional, to shunt responsibility in reported speech (‘He said it but I don’t guarantee it’s true’.)?
Hey Emanuel, I’ve looked through the comments but I think there hasn’t been any question like the following:
What would the function of “es” in these sentences be?
a) Ich hatte es eilig. I was in a hurry.
b) Er meint es gut. He means well.
Are they the rain-es, except that they are not subject?
Nice examples! Yes, they function as direct object here, but they don’t really stand for anything.
Well, okay… actually in the sentence with “meinen” the “es” refers to “whatever he does”. But in the first one, the “es” really just fulfills “habens” desire for a direct object.
Hope that helps :)
Schöne Erklärung Emanuel. Sehr interessantes Thema. Ist also im folgenden Satz das zweite “es” ein “Dummy Subject”, das den Kasten für Grammatik ausfüllt? Steht es für die Stadt, die Besucher auf sich aufmerksam macht?
Immerhin, etwa eine halbe Million sind es jährlich, die es in
diese an Sehenswürdigkeiten so reiche Stadt lockt, allerdings vornehmlich Tagesausflügler.
Beste Wünsche.
Oh, das ist ein schönes Beispiel :D.
Das erste “es” wird von dem Relativesatz “gefüllt”, also ja… ein dummy.
Das zweite “es” ist so wie “es regnet”. Ein unspezifisches “es”. Es steht NICHT für die Stadt, denn “Stadt” ist weiblich.
Hilft das?
Hello!Looking at this sentence:
Es haben [drei Kinder] [die Kuh] gesehen
Can we say there is a similar logic to the da words in the sense that those are as well generic replacements where the case of the replaced term is not important?
“generic replacements”… yes, you can look at them that way. There’s a difference however to the “es” in your example, because that one literally has NO content. It stands for nothing and if we reshuffle the sentence it goes away.
The da-words do stand for something, and they do not go away just because we change word order.
So they’re more like “es” in this example:
– Ich finde es schön, dass du kommst.
The “es” is a stand-in for the dass-part, so it has “content”. The one in your example has nothing, it’s really just a filler.
Hope that helps.
This makes a lot of sense now! Thanks a lot, your blog really helped me looking at German grammar from a totally different perspective!
I didn’t expect learning could be this fun:-)
Es gibt noch viel zu lernen aber mit Emanuel gibt es keinen Bedarf zur Sorge.
Es gab keinen Fehler in deinem Satz.
Aber es wäre idiomatischer, zu sagen “keinen Grund zur Sorge” :)
Hi Emanuel,
There is an example in my textbook that reads “Die Kaffeemaschine ist nicht alt. Es ist eine neue Kaffeemaschine.” Next to this example is a little call-out box that looks like this: https://imgur.com/wu67tUm
Can you help me unterstand if this is just a really simple example dummy subjects?
Thank you!!
I wouldn’t really call it a dummy. It is a generic “it” that could be replaced with “das Ding”.
If you were talking about a person you wouldn’t use “es”; that’s the main indicator why it’s NOT a dummy.
– Maria ist schön. Sie (NOT: es) ist eine schöne Frau.
The note-box in the textbook is about adjectives being used without endings vs with endings. The “es” is not the focus there.
Hope that helps :)
Hello! I have a question. There is an example in your post about the tree. And of course we can not use “es”, because its masculin. So how can we replace “der Baum” in this sentence? With “ihn”, but its not lively being…
Hi Irina, you’d say “ich kenne ihn.” It doesn’t matter in German if you’re talking about a being or a thing. The grammatical gender (der, die, das) is what matters.
– der Baum – > er
– die Sonne – > sie
…
Hope that helps.
Wait, what am I saying :)… grammatically “Ich wirke daran” would be correct but it does NOT mean “I’m working on it” because “wirken” doesn’t mean “to work” in sense of humans doing work. It would be
“Ich arbeite daran.”
hey,very helpful Blog,omg that really helps me a lot to improve my Deutsch,btw,can u explain the difference between these 2 sentences?
Es sind die Sachen,die ich brauche,mir zu glingen
Es sind die Sachen,was ich brauche,mir zu glingen
which one is right? i really can’t tell the difference or how and when to use between was and die als pronoun in a sentence? if possible,can u explain it to me?
das wäre sehr nett von dir^^
The first sentence is more correct than the second one (“die” not “was”) but it’s not really correct either. Sounds like from an old German poem from 200 years ago. What were you trying to say?
As for “die” vs. “was”.. you could try and read the article on wo-words. The stuff I explain there is basically the answer to this question, too, even though the article is about wo-word (worauf vs. auf das and so on). It’s quite dense and might be scary at first but yeah.. give it a try.
With what I understood, die is relative pronoun used to refer to Sachen in plural and was can be used to refer to the whole sentence and some other things I can’t remember what they are called. For example, Streit ist das Schlimmste,was in einer Familie passieren könnte.
Yes, “was” refers to “das” or it constitutes a free relative that is reference and referenced element in one :).
Could you do a post explaining ‘es gibt’
Hmm… what exactly are you having trouble with? The difference to “es ist”?
I am having trouble with this difference. I would be grateful for a post on it.
Added to the to do list, as requested :)
An English-speaker note:
Ich verstehe (((((es))))), dass du nicht mitkommen willst.
I understand (((((it)))))) that you don’t want to come with.
The english sentence similarly to the german one does not sound quite right. I think this is because of dass/that, as they are definitive, and play a similar role to the word ‘it’ in the sentence.
Ich verstehe (es), wenn du nicht mitkommen willst.
I understand ((it)) if you don’t want to come with.
This sounds more proper, because ‘if’ is a very different word than ‘it’ and plays its own role.
That’s an interesting parallel, thank you!
When I read “Ich habe die Party gelassen, weil es kein Bier mehr gab.” I interpreted it as “I decided to give up the idea of hosting the party, because there was no more beer.”
As for “Das ist ihr sen Buch”, I did hear a child in Sachsen say “Das ist Francheska sein Bett” and similar things a few times. Although this child had three brothers and just one sister so that might partly explain it.
Thanks so much for this blog, it’s a joy to read and I always learn something new.
Hi, so i came across this sentence:
-Du kannst jetzt nicht schlafen, es sind Monster in der Nähe
-You may not rest now, there are monsters nearby
what does “es” mean? is it the filler es?
-Monster sind in der Nähe
-In der Nähe sind Monster
Are one of the three more right?
or is that normally how you say “there are” in german, literally “it are”, but i would think it should be “sie sind”
also, i thought “there are” translates to “es gibt”?
It’s definitely the filler. So don’t think too hard about translations. The other two options are just as correct. The one with monster first is the least idiomatic one, to me. The reason is that monster is the big news here, and that tends to come later in the sentence, not right in the beginning (more on that in my post on word order). Using the dummy-es allows us to have both these new pieces of info (nearby, monsters) in the latter half of the sentence. Hope that helps.
yes that helps a lot :). i thought about the context of the sentence and i feel like i’m starting to develop a sense of those word order forces you talked about. “Monster in der Nähe” is what defines the message you want to get across so the pieces want to stay together, but without the filler, you’d have to split the info and they would seem less relevant to each other
Ich werde es dir nie vergessen. / I will never forget you.
How does ‘es’ is relevant here ?
In this sentence, the “es” is a reference to a specific thing the person will not forgot. The actual translation would be:
– I will never forget that you did that (for me).
I think it’s more common in positive contexts but it works for negative memories, too.
Hope that helps.
Perfectly explained!! Thank you so much, you’re my hero of the month! hahaha
What about “Ich bin’s”?
That’s a filler. Or actually it’s more like a placeholder for “I am the one who is here/who just knocked”. Sometimes, the “es”-part gets filled with content in the same sentence
– Ich war es, der dein Bier getrunken hat.
– It was me/I who drank your beer.
In English has the same “it”. Just that it’s on the other side of the verb.
Vielen Dank für die Erklärung!