When to use “trotzdem” – The Quiz

Hello everyone,

And welcome back to you German Word of the Day. And today, we’ll actually do a kind of recap session about

The meaning and use of “trotzdem”

Now some of you might be like “Wait, I feel like you have a lesson about that, right?”.
And yes, I do have a lesson about trotzdem and the differences to trotz and obwohl.

But it was already quite old and definitely needed a little do-over. I’ve done that recently and I also added a second proper learning quiz there.

But most of you were not going to see that, so I decided that this might actually make for a nice refresher episode, summer camp style :).

So, today I’ll give you a quick recap about trotzdem and its translations and then we’ll do a learning quiz where you have to say whether or not trotzdem would actually fit in a given context. And when I say learning quiz, I mean that each answer comes with a little explanation.

So if you’re ready, let’s jump right in.

trotzdem, obwohl and trotz – A Quick overview

trotz, trotzdem and obwohl are the three main German words you need to express “despite-ness” between two actions, events or facts.
Basically, event 1 suggests or demands that event 2 should NOT happen, but event 2 happens.

• Event 1: It’s pouring rain.
• Event 2: I go for a run.

• Event 1:  The sign says “No parking here.”
• Event 2: Thomas parks here.

Expressing relations like these in one sentence is a crucial puzzle piece of language, and something that is usually taught WAY TOO LATE, at least in German. That’s because most textbooks and courses consider it too “complicated” for beginners and much rather spend their time making people feel guilty about not getting the articles correct while teaching names of vegetables no one ever eats and body parts no one has.
I … I mean body parts no one uses. Like… the words for them.

But anyway, expressing the idea of despite-ness is something we do every day and most languages have multiple options to do it.

• Despite the pouring rain, I go for a run.
• It’s raining. I go for a run regardless.
• Although it’s pouring rain, I go for a run.
• It’s pouring rain, but I still go for a run.
• It’s pouring rain. I go for a run anyway.
• …

As you can see, all sentences express the same core idea, but they’re structurally different.

And that’s also the difference between trotz, trotzdem and obwohl. They express the same thing, but they’re different word types and hence function differently.

trotz is a preposition so it connects a noun and the direct counterpart in English in meaning as well as function is despite.

• despite the rain
• trotz des Regens
  (yes, it goes with Genitive now)

obwohl is what’s called a subordinating conjunction. Those are these little words that introduce a side-sentence and that make the verb go home to the end in German. The direct counterpart in English in meaning and function is although.

• Ich gehe laufen, obwohl es sehr stark regnet.
• I’m going for a run, although it’s raining very heavily.

And trotzdem is an adverb. Originally, it simply was a combination of the preposition trotz and the pronoun dem  in Dative (which trotz used to go with back in the day). It simply fused into one word but functionally and in terms of meaning it pretty much means despite that.

• Es regnet extrem doll. Trotzdem gehe ich laufen.
• It’s raining extremely heavily. Despite that, I go for a run.

Cool.
So that’s the short overview of the three words and their functional counterparts.

• trotz – despite
• trotzdem – despite that
• obwohl – although (even though)

These really are the sort of soul mate pairs. However, particularly trotzdem can be a translation for quite a lot of other words too.

The translations of “trotzdem”

When you look up trotzdem in a dictionary, you’ll get a whole bunch of translations:

• still
• yet
• though
• nonetheless
• regardless
• anyway
• nevertheless
• …

Some of them are just synonyms for despite that but others like still, yet or anyway have other meanings and do NOT always express this notion of “despite-ness” that we talked about earlier.

One approach to determine if trotzdem is the way to go to express something in German is to just try to paraphrase the sentence with despite that and see if the meaning changes.

• Have you seen the movie yet?
• Have you seen the movie despite that?

Here, the meaning changes, so the yet does NOT actually express “despite-ness”.

• It’s raining and yet, I go for a run.
• It’s raining and despite that I go for a run.

Here, the meaning doesn’t really change, so this would be a case for Captain Trotzdem in German.

But of course this replacement test is really just a crutch. What’s much better is to have a FEELING for this sense of despite-ness. And it’s not like this is something complicated to discover and develop.  We all have it already because we all can express “despite-ness” and understand “despite-ness” in our mother tongue.
We don’t need to learn something new. We just need to raise our awareness.

And that’s what the goal of the exercise is today :).

When to use “trotzdem” – The Quiz

The core goal of this practice is that you “feel” this sense of despite-ness.

I’ll give you sentences in English that use one of the words from the previous section and you have to decide whether or not the statement could be expressed with trotzdem in German.

If you click the hint, you’ll get the German translation with a blank in the spot where the translation would be.

And for each answer, I’ll give you a short explanation about it AND I’ll give you the way to actually express the sentence in German if it’s not trotzdem.

That’s pretty much all you need to know, so now I’d say viel Spaß and viel Erfolg :)

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Und? Wie lief’s?
Let me know in the comments how you did and if you started to get a bit of a feeling for it. If not, don’t worry. Just do the exercise again and don’t focus on the words so much but on the vibe.
Of course, if you have any questions about any of the examples or about the topic in general, just ask in the comments and I’ll do my best to clear it up.
And if you want to read the other article about trotzdem and obwohl, you can find it here:

Word of the Day – “trotzdem”

I really hope you enjoyed this one.
Have a great week and see you next time.. probably with a huge improvement to the site ;).