Advent Calendar 14 – “Prep School”

I like these workouts.

I didn’t do so hot on this one…

I was practically 100% on whether or not it’s a wo word, a da word or neither, but I was 50% or less on which preposition. I guess this is pure memorization……..right?

I love the idea of nouns with prepositions in names!! Would love to see a article there…I could try to make a few, but not sure my vocabulary is large enough, or my grammar good enough…maybe we can start a reader collection?

I’ll try one:
Ich habe mich gestern mit meiner neuen Mitbewohnerin verabredet.

Hopefully that works…..

In the entry
worauf bist du stolz? 
darauf, dass ich den B1 Test geschafft habe. (Entry number 8 down)

I don’t find the meaning of ‘sein auf’ or ‘auf sein’ if I didn’t have the answer already how could I find out that ‘auf’ is the preposition for this case?

Also, I don’t find the meaning for ‘auf schaffen’, to build the reply sentence.

So in this exercise, I don’t see how I could’ve done without Emanuel’s help. In other words, I don’t see how to apply the quasi-rule I am lerning.

Could someone give me some ideas please.

Thank you in anticipation

LOL! I couldn’t reply to your comment about your commenting policy! :) Also, I assume you have disabled replying through WordPress. Usually I see comments when I look at my own blog and can reply without returning to the other person’s blog, but with yours, the comments don’t go through, and I have to return to your page. Is that intentional?

Thanks!

I got so many more wrong than right. A bit disappointing, but clearly an important grammar lesson :/

Hi Emanuel
I’m trying to do the verb+prep exercise and I think the best for me is to memorize your examples to help me remember the preposition plus the structure… not easy but there is nothing easy in german anyway.
In my searches I found a clever idea, to use a noun that includes the preposition in its name. For instance, Aufzug can be used with aufwarten to help in the brain-wiring process.
You may want to consider that idea when possible.
Great to have workouts even when the every body is in party mood

I don’t know anything about Duolingo, but it’s worth poking through the Word of the Day archives on here. I know “freuen,” “ausmachen,” “nachdenken,” and probably several other of the verbs on the worksheet have their own articles. It shouldn’t be too long (relatively speaking) before you get to a lot of the vocab from the worksheet – the sentences are all pretty ordinary everyday things to be talking about. Failing that, it would be worth your time just to toil your way through translating the sentences, looking up each word.

Just to help you get the basic way these sentences work: as you learn different verbs, you might often see them in the format {[sich]} + [infinitive] + [preposition]. Sich is a reflexive pronoun, meaning basically “oneself” (so a reflexive verb is something that’s always done, if only in some very abstract way, TO the subject). Warten is never reflexive, but erinnern can be, as in its very common meaning of “remember”: sich erinnern an can be literally translated as “remind oneself of,” but it really just means “remember” or “recall.”

That example is reasonably intuitive, but sich freuen is a little more difficult for an English speaker, because there’s no really literal way to translate it that makes any sense in modern English. It would come out as something like “rejoice oneself,” but again, the actual meaning is “be happy” or “be glad.”

Then the other tricky part – the focus of this exercise – is the change in meaning that prepositions can bring about. Here, the parallels to English aren’t too hard to find. The verb in “look out for someone” means something different from the one in “look down on someone.” In the same sort of way, sich über etwas freuen (super-woodenly-literally: “rejoice oneself over something”) means “be happy about something,” while sich auf etwas freuen (“rejoice oneself onto something” – see what I mean about not being able to translate literally?) means “look forward to something.”

The “wo-” words are preposition question words: “auf was” (“on[to] what”) turns into “worauf,” “über was” (“over/about what”) becomes “worüber,” “nach was” (“after/to what”) becomes “wonach,” etc. It can be helpful to think of German as more similar to Shakespearean English: “worauf freust du dich?” is something like “whereon rejoicest thou thyself?” or, in actual real English, “what are you looking forward to?”

The Shakespeare-y comparison can help with the “da-” words, too:

– Worauf wartest du?
– Wherefor waitest thou? (What are you waiting for?)

– Darauf, dass der Bus kommt.
– Therefor, that the bus come. (For the bus to come.)

Like I say, there are articles on the site here that explain all this stuff in more fun ways, but that’s basically what’s going on. The actual expressions and vocab on the exercise are definitely things to learn by heart, so if they’re not popping up in Duolingo, I’d make flashcards or find some other way to supplement your learning to include them.

I love these exercises! This one is a bit too advanced for this beginner because I have no idea when to use those terms or even what each of them means. I am using Duolingo to learn German, and these expressions are not explained clearly or used much in the program. Any place you can point me to for some help on this?

I particularly liked A Case for a Coffee and today’s exercise. I added them to Voice Flashcards. Very helpful. Thank you.

Another vote for these exercises. I have been able to coordinate both with my German grammar text, Die Gelbe Aktuell, for extra “value.” Really appreciate the extra effort.
I did run across a use, ausrichten auf in an article on Der Spiegel on line today–sort of an ironic subject for a German language study site though. In context the use was:

Jetzt zieht Volkswagen nach und macht Englisch zur offiziellen Konzernsprache. “Digitalisierung, Vernetzung und Elektromobilität werden unsere Branche grundlegend verändern”, sagte Personalvorstand Karlheinz Blessing. “Deshalb richten wir unsere Managementkultur rechtzeitig darauf aus.”

This is a great exercise format. One thought – that very first one on the worksheet looks more like a “sich freuen über” than a “sich freuen auf” to me. I mean, I guess you could be looking forward to good weather as well as being happy about it, but I wondered if that was what you had in mind.

Emanuel,
Exercises with their solution is the best for me because I can find out my weaknesses.
Thank you

This is a great one! Thanks Emanuel.

Many, many thanks for this. It’s exactly the kind of exercise that I need. Also, thank you for letting us nonmembers have access to every day’s Adventskalendar. I need to ask Santa for a membership!