German Advent Calendar – Day 5

Hello everyone,

And welcome back to this year’s German learning calendar, door number five, and it arguably has the most obscure title so far.
I mean… Anne, Aufer, Zues. Looks a bit like it could be names, but it isn’t.
What it is is a bit of colloquial German for you that you absolutely won’t find in a textbook, but that you MIGHT come across in real life here and that might be very, very confusing.

Let’s look at an actual example and see if you can figure it out :)

• Ein aufer Kühlschrank verbraucht mehr Strom als ein zuer.

And here’s the translations:

• An open fridge uses more electricity than a closed one.

Now some of you might be wondering “Wait, so prepositions can be adjectives?!”
But that’s not really what’s going on.
Yes, auf and zu are prepositions with a spatial sense. But they ALSO have a second sense, that is more like an adjective. auf carries the idea of open and zu has the idea of closed. And those sense show up when the words are used as prefixes…

• Ich habe die Tür aufgemacht/zugemacht.
• I opened/closed the door.
• Lit: “I made the door open/closed.”

… but with some verbs, like sein or werden, they DON’T become prefixes. Why not? Well, that’s more of a spelling convention than a difference in grammar, but the effect is that they pretty much work like adjectives.

• Die Tür ist auf/zu.
• The door is open/closed.

This is the exact same phrasing as saying “The door is green.” and just as we can say “the green door”, people also use this weird prefix-adjective hybrid and move it in front of the noun.
And of course it then gets adjective endings like any other adjective.

• die aufe/zue Tür
• the open/closed door

And this is not limited to auf and zu. It’s also done with an (on) and aus (off) and you can even find it with weg (gone) and durch (through, broken) or um (around, over). Basically, it can work for any verb-prefix that can also be used to describe a state.

• Ich setze mich an den annen Kamin, um mich zu wärmen.
• I sit down next to the working/burning fireplace to warm up.

• Ich war den ganzen Tag mit aussem Handy unterwegs.
• I was going around the entire day with a turned off phone.

• Warum sitzt man mit anner Jacke und ummem Schal in der Sauna?
• Why does one sit in sauna with a coat on and a scarf around the neck?

Now, examples like these are EXTREMELY colloquial and you should not use it in any written context and also NOT in a speaking part of an exam.

But if you can pull one of these off at the right moment with your friends, they’ll either be super duper impressed by how authentic your German has become… or they will correct you, because they’re boring grammar nazis and want you to learn “pRoPeR” German.

Anyway, that’s it for today.

Let me know in the comments if you were aware that this is a thing and if you’ve maybe heard it in the wild and got confused by it. Of course, if you have any questions about it, let’s clear things up further in the comments. And last but not least… the comment is your safe space if you want to play around and try an example yourself :).

I hope you enjoyed this one, have a great day und bis morgen.