Position of “nicht” – Exercise

Hello everyone,

and welcome a new episode of our mini e-course on how to awaken the potential within you and create the dream life you’ve always wanted to dream of but never dared dreaming for this world crushes dreams like it wants to make a dream Mojito. And today, we’ll practice one of the most important skills ever… saying NO!
No, I am not going to stay longer at the office. No, I do not enjoy watching Rom Coms. Fuck no, we do not have almond milk.
And no bro, I do not want not another beer.
Okay, seriously… of course this is not a life improvement blog. It’s a German improvement blog.
But we will practice to say “no”, because today we’ll have the third part of our mini series on

The Amazing Positions of nicht

Hoooooray!
In the first two parts, we’ve learned the theory and if you haven’t read them you should really check them out first.
“But Emanuel, we’ve had a chapter on that in our textbook, so I think I know the theor…”
Shush… you do not! Seriously, textbooks and courses have a really weird approach to the topic.
“But Emanuel, can I just try the exercise and see how it goes?”
Hmm… yeah, I guess you can do that. But for all those of you who want to check out my crazy, mind blowing explanations, here are the links:

The position of “nicht” 1 – One rule is enough, as long as you make crazy assumptions
The position of “nicht” 2 – Not what you’d expect a grammar explanation to be

Today, we’ll practice what we’ve learned, so let’s jump right in :)

Here’s what we’ll do:

I will give you 42 (reference alert) sentences that you have to negate in German by putting nicht somewhere (so no kein or nie or something).
Originally, I wanted to give you English sentences to translate but I soon found that for common stuff the phrasing is sometimes completely different in German. So I decided to also give you the non-negated version in German. So the English gives you the idea you want to express and the German sentence gives you a model where you just have to insert nicht somewhere.
Here’s how it looks:

1. I am not eating my soup.          <- the sentence to say in German
   Ich esse meine Suppe.              <- the non-negated version in German, mainly for structure
   Ich esse meine Suppe nicht.  <- you’re doing this

With the exception of one or two or three examples, they all don’t have the negation focus on one particular element, so what you basically need to do is to put nicht into the neutral position, where it doesn’t create tension. If you don’t know what that is and how to find it… check out my explanations first ;).
We can then in the comments talk about what would happen if we move nicht around in a particular sentence, if you’re interested.
Oh and note that sometimes, there’s more than one correct answer. So more than one placement of nicht sounds neutral. So if your answer is not the same as mine but you don’t understand why… it might be correct as well, so just ask about it in the comments.

Remember… the main goal of this exercise is NOT that you get everything correctly. The main goal is to see where and why you fail and to confront you with certain situations that are tricky so we can clear it all up.

The solutions are as always in the audio and you can show them by tapping the button.
Also… viel Spaß :)

Work Out – Position of “nicht”

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And? How’d you do? Was it difficult? How many did you get wrong? Do you have questions about any of the sentences?
Let me know all your feedback and questions in the comments.
I hope you liked it and see you next time.