Hello everyone,
and welcome to our German Word of the Day Tag Team Special.
This time we will have a look at the meaning and grammar of a really important combination. Say hello to:
weder… noch…
Suppose you have a bad day and you are grumpy as hell. People might offer you things to make you feel better and yet this is just making you even grumpier. If you know what I mean, then you will find lots of joy with weder… noch… . They’re every true nay-sayer’s dream and they will make your rejections sound much more definite.
- “Hey, wir gehen ins Kino, willst du mitkommen.”
“Neeeeeee, keine Lust.”
“Willst du lieber was trinken?”
“Neee… WEDER Kino NOCH Bar!”
“Ok, ok… schon gut.” - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Even without translation, you might have guessed it from context… weder… noch is the German version of neither… nor. So it’s the perfect answer to entweder … oder… (either … or) – well, if you don’t like either of the alternatives. And as far as structure goes, weder noch works pretty much the same as neither nor. So we can use it to negate two nouns like here:
- Ich will weder Kaffee noch Tee.
- I want neither coffee nor tea.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Das hat weder Hand noch Fuß.
- There is neither rhyme nor reason in that. (idiom)
Lit: That has neither hand nor foot. - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
But it also works for negating two full sentences, like here:
- Weder habe ich eine Idee, wer dein Bier getrunken hat, noch ist da irgendwas in meinem Zimmer, das dir helfen könnte, die Person zu finden.
- Neither have I any idea who drank your beer, nor is there anything in my room that could help you find this person.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
And if you look closely at the last example, you will actually see something REALLY strange. Both languages are using the same sentence structure here. And actually, it’s the GERMAN version. Like… in German, the verb always comes in position two, no matter whether we’ve already had the subject or not. English is different in that you usually put the subject before the verb.
- Gestern habe ich…
- Yesterday, I have
But not in case of neither… nor. Instead of saying this:
- Neither, I want to… nor, I can to… NOPE
English says this:
- Neither do I want to… nor can I…
- Weder will ich… noch kann ich…
So it puts the verb second (or add the helper “do” there).
And in German, both weder and noch count as position 1 and the verb comes after.
That’s actually different to entweder … oder, where it’s up to us.
Cool.
So now we know what the combination weder noch means and that it’s pretty much the same as neither nor. That doesn’t apply to the words by themselves, though.
Noch is actually super common by itself and quite the range of uses. I’ve got an entire article about it and it’s really really really long. I’ll leave a link below if you want to see something really long and hard… ahem…
Weder kind of makes up for noch’s complexity because by itself it means… nothing.
“Wait, so it doesn’t actually mean neither?”
Exactly. You will only see weder in the combination with noch. And the big question now is how to translate neither.
How to translate “neither”
Shut up, headline. I just said said that.
So, the English neither as a standalone can be boiled down to two concepts.
The first one is about “joining a negation”. The best example is “me neither‘” which is basically “Me also not“. And that’s exactly how it is said in German. We say auch nicht.
- “Ich mag keinen Rosé.”
“Ich auch nicht.” - “I don’t like Rosé.”
“Me neither.” - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Maria hat ihre Hausaufgaben nicht gemacht. Tom auch nicht.
- Maria didn’t do her homework. Neither did Tom.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
And while we’re at it… this is also how German says “not either”. Which expresses the same stuff basically.
- “Ich mag auch keinen Rosé”
- “I do not like Rosé either.”
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Tom hat seine Hausaufgaben auch nicht gemacht.
- Tom has not done his homework either.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Cool.
The other idea of neither is a negation of two (or more) things in one go. An example is ‘neither of us’ and in German, this neither is translated to keiner. Or keine. Or keines. Or keinem. Or keinen. Or keiner… oh wait, we already had that. So yeah… we have to go through the motions of gender and case with these endings…
- Ich habe beide Biersorten in der Bar probiert, und keine war lecker.
- I tried both types of beer in that bar and neither one was tasty.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Komm schon! Keiner von uns wäscht gerne ab. Aber einer muss.
- Come on! Neither one of us likes to do the dishes but one has to.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
And that’s pretty much it. Well, actually, let’s look at a few more examples for weder … noch. Just as a recall.
- Ich mag weder Schokolade noch Eis.
- I like neither chocolate nor ice cream.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Weder will ich Fußball gucken, noch habe ich Appetit auf Bier.
- Neither do I want to watch Soccer nor do I feel like drinking beer.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
I guess we should also mention that weder noch can be used as a standalone answer. Like here:
- “Gehst du zur Arbeit oder zur Universität””
“Weder noch. “ - “Are you going to work or to university?”
“Neither of the two.”
Oh and should you ever feel the need to reject more than two things simply add nochs to your sentence:
- Ich mag weder “Star Wars Episode 1”, noch “Der Weiße Hai 2”, noch “Matrix 2”, noch “Matrix 3”, noch….
And that’s all for today. Hooray.
This was our look at the meaning and use of weder noch. If you want to check how much you remember and if you’ve understood everything, you can take the little quiz we have prepared. Well, you will be able to take it once I’ve finished it. It is Friday, the 17th of January 2020, Emanuel is sitting at his desk working. Grinding the Germ… oh wait, it’s actually finished :).
And of course, if you have any questions about weder noch, just leave me a comment and I’ll do my best to clear things up.
Hope you liked it and see you next time.
further reading:
why
what
happened
Hi Emanuel, so I have noticed that the sentence structures of “Entweder…oder…” and “Weder…noch…” are quite different from each other. You wrote in the example of “Enteder..order..” both of the following sentences are okay:
“Entweder gehe ich heim oder ich trinke ein Bier.”
“Entweder ich gehe heim oder ich trinke ein Bier. ”
but if we rewrite the sentence in “Weder…noch…” format, then it can only be:
“Weder gehe Ich heim noch trinke ich ein Bier.” (right?)
I am a little bit confused about why the verb positions are so different from each other. Is there a reason behind it? Please enlighten me! Thx a lot :)
What would be the right way to express the english short answer “Neither!”
Something one would answer for a question asking whether I want this or that?
Dict.cc gives one translation of Neither (thanks) to Weder noch (Danke).
Thanks
That’s correct.
-” Willst du Kaffee oder Tee?”
“Weder noch.”
I just read your noch article and came back to this one i read earlier. Now i have noch a question. Based on the additional sense of noch.
Is the noch here like: I like neither/weder this and ADDITIONALLY/noch this… etc.
(I reject this and additionally i reject this too)
Or am I totally imagining things.
I have never really thought about this, “weder … noch… ” was kind of a fixed thing for me, but it actually makes a lot of sense!!
Hello, I just started to learn German and find your article was really helpful :D
As my teacher said that “weder” take the first position, so instead of “Ich mag weder Schokolade noch Eis”, we have to say “Weder mag ich Schokolade oder Eis.”
Where we actually put the “weder “? Is it on the first position or anywhere before the “something” we want to emphasise? Is this rule strict?
Vielen Dank!
You’re teacher is saying weird things. Or maybe he/she meant that it’s the first position of an element. It’s definitely before the element that you negate, so “weder” can be pretty much anywhere except at the very end.
– Ich bin weder gestern noch heute im Park gewesen.
– I’ve been to the park neither yesterday nor today.
– Weder ich noch meine Schwester waren gestern im Park.
– Neither me nor my sister have been to the park
– Ich war gestern weder im Park noch auf dem Markt.
– I was neither at the market yesterday, nor in the park.
– Ich will im Park weder lesen noch laufen.
– At the park I neither want to read nor to walk.
(the translations are rather literal and I’m not sure if it’s proper English)
Here’s an example where “weder” is a proper number 1
– Weder habe ich gestern Pizza gegessen, noch war ich im Park.
– Neither have I eaten a pizza yesterday, nor have I been to the park.
The “weder – noch” negates the activity as a whole in this example (eating a pizza, being at the park)
Hope that helps.
This is a little tangential to the post, but how good does something have to taste to be “lecker”? I think I was taught that “lecker” was similar to “delicious” (looooong ago, so it might not actually be a teacher’s fault), but it seems to me that the bar is a little lower for “lecker.” “Tasty” seems more like it, but the example you give (and I think I’ve seen and heard others like it) makes it seem like “lecker” is almost a baseline description of something worth eating/drinking. Just curious about that – it’s one of those places where I feel like there’s a cultural difference even though the meaning isn’t that hard to translate.
Also, I agree with Jo about pretty much everything in her comments.
Hmmm…. I’d say “lecker” is just “tasty”. But then again, a moderate praise in America is already pretty strong for German ears. Like… an American would say
– That’s amazing
and we’d say
– Das ist cool.
So it might be the same with food and “tasty” is in fact meaning “meh.. I’ve had better”. “Lecker” means you genuinely like it.But you have plenty of room to intensify that
– krass/echt/voll/super-/hammer- lecker
and there’s one notch below
– das ist ganz lecker
it’s still tasty but there’s some notion of doubt in there. Maybe you had doubt before or you want to disperse the doubt of the other person without getting too enthusiastic about it.
Actually…. something just came to mind: “Lecker” is definitely a word you could use for advertisement. Of course I don’t know but I feel like “tasty” in an American TV ad wouldn’t be “loud” enough, maybe ?
Hi Emanuel! I keep coming back and re-reading these posts over and over – they’re so useful! Especially for the tricky words like noch and doch… I’m surprised there are only a couple of comments on this one – you usually get heaps, especially for funky words like noch. So even though the post is like over a year and a half old, I figured I’d comment, hope you don’t mind!
One interesting difference between English and Deutsch I notice with your examples is that “neither” can only be used if there are only two possibilities. So we don’t say, “I tried three types of beer in that bar and neither one was tasty.” You could say “Can you believe that bar only had two kinds of beer?! I tried both types, and neither (one) was tasty.” If there’s more than two, you’d have to say something like “none of them were tasty”.* Likewise, the dishes example is fine, but just be aware that saying “neither of us” implies only two people involved, otherwise you’d say “none of us”.
(*As an aside, here I would say “none of them were” rather than “none of them was”, but if you want to check out a big online argument, Google “none of them were none of them was”…)
This applies equally when neither is in a neither-nor construction. So your last example with the form “weder-noch-noch-noch…” doesn’t translate directly. The following does not work: “I like neither “Star Wars Episode 1″, nor “Der Weiße Hai 2″, nor “Matrix 2″, nor “Matrix 3″, nor…”. In this case, we’d just say “I don’t like “Star Wars Episode 1″, or …” (Note that usually I’d use “or” if I wasn’t using “neither”. There’s nothing wrong with “nor”, as in “I don’t like A, nor B, nor C…” and it’s probably a regional thing as to whether “or” or “nor” is used. It sounds a bit quaint to me – I’d probably only use “nor” here if I wanted to sound kind of poetic or dramatic or literary.)
Oh wow, I didn’t know that. That was really interesting. Danke :).
It’s also interesting that you’d use “or” for these kinds of listings. To me that sounds quite strange. The only way I can make it work is to think of the “or”-parts as kindof afterthoughts. In German you’d need to make a clear pause after every movie. I think the German “oder” is a bit more like the exclusive logic-“or”….
– Ich mag den Star Wars oder Star Trek nicht.
Just by itself, this is a weird statement.. like.. speaking in riddles, kind of. Oh well… English once again proves that it is more flexible.
Hum! Ok, I thought I’d better double-check my assertion online, and it seems to be one of those things that people argue about, and say that it’s just prescriptivism gone mad, so I guess don’t worry about it. (I heard that some English speakers suddenly decided around about the 19th century to go crazy with making up English grammar rules, but a lot of the rules are of dubious necessity or even authenticity. Things like not ending sentences with prepositions.) But if you’re ever in a situation where you need to use formal written English, maybe better off avoiding a structure with more than 2 options for either “neither-nor’ or “either-or”. (Recursion unintended!) That’s how I learnt to do it in school, so it does sound a little odd to me to add more options, but probably lots of people use it that way and it’s not a big deal – the meaning is clear anyway.
Ha… yeah I’ve seen a few of these discussions about English grammar (mainly about whether or not there is a predicate nominative) and they’re always really heated. I just checked the etymology of “(n)either” and it used to mean “each of the two”… so I think in this case there is something to the conservative view :)
https://etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=either&searchmode=none
((OK, this is a little weird: the comment template looks really strange in the app-ified version of YDG that I’m using. Hmm, let’s add a little screenshot https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dxJ233m1NJ81QB29qRBigafiHdAJcuKV/view?usp=sharing. Maybe something else “javascripty” needs to be added to the “package” that gets downloaded?))
Anyway, back to the topic *in der Nähe*: I still remember being in my second year of high school and having an incredibly frustrating argument with my sadistic Japanese teacher about the use of the word “either”. I’d written something like “trees were placed either side of the main door”, meaning that there was a tree to the left and a tree to the right of the door, but my answer was marked incorrect, as “it says there’d only be one tree next to the door”. Even calling on several other students to try and convince him –ever so politely– that his English wasn’t as immaculate as he repeatedly claimed there was no way of denting his arrogance. Just to end the story: for various reasons, mostly related to this evil so-and-so, I dropped out of Japanese the next year, and the teacher was soon moved on to continue his torture of students at another high school, in the very best tradition of churches with offending priests.
Hot take: there are trees on either side means there are NO trees, because they cancel each other out.
Makes perfect sense in Z/(2*Z), aka Z_2.
Or perhaps there’s a potential that causes the phase of the field representing the left of the two identical trees to rotate by pi/2? Crests and troughs/Branches and boughs: Wo liegt denn der Unterschied? It’s obliteration all the way.
The spin. Trees on the left are usually spin up, the ones on the right are spin down. The rotation is quantum mechanics as well, meaning the exact rotation factor is a probability density, but since “either” creates entangled trees and so on and so on… So that Japanese teacher didn’t even understand quantum botany, lol, like… wtf.
So, so lacking… the guy tried to make troublesome students behave using a handful of techniques, including (1) Brain reorganisation via the use of folders and textbooks brought down with force on a student’s head, aka shock therapy sans electricity (2) A magic trick involving the violent clunking of the heads of two students together, which he delightfully called “coconuts” — perhaps with the aim of making both heads cancel out, but Wolfgang Pauli had his number there– and (3) Using trigger points to induce headaches (with variable levels of success). Good times :-/
He was quite the showman… half of our Japanese lesson would be devoted to hearing about how talented he was, including semi-successful exhibitions of him using virtual abaci to multiply numbers, and endless regurgitations of stories about how he was “regarded as a playboy” in Japan. What we didn’t hear much of was how he’d landed at our school: seems that entering the tents of teenage girls on a school camp after lights-out didn’t go down so well, shocking as that may sound!
Your English is correct! You can also, and perhaps more logically, say “I go neither to work nor (to) University”. Both work for me. The “to” is optional at least in speech, but gives a nice emphasis and balance to the sentence.
One correction though. As “neither” is already negative, you omit “don’t” and say “I like neither chocolate nor ice cream.” The Japanese, who are very literal with yes (agree to sentence content) and no (disagree) may otherwise think you do like both!
Cheers.
Corrected it. Vielen Dank :)
Emanuel, what does “Willst du lieber was trinken?” mean?
Depends on the context… literally it is “Would you rather drink something” but that rarely makes sense… maybe if someone offers you a snack and you turn it down and then they offer sth to drink instead.
In context of making plans for a date or night out the sentence means the rather basic option of going to a bar and have a few drinks there as opposed to go see a movie or to a friends house party or to that vernissage.
Usually this version is accompanied by a nur or einfach to underline the simplicity of it
“Hmmm what could we do”
“Wollen wir einfach was trinken (gehen)?”
So… these are the 2 readings that I can think of but no garantuee :)
It means, do you want something to drink.
Do you love something to drink.
I would say prefer, not love
Yup, fully agree! The “lieber” lends a notion of decision between two things to the statement. That’s at the heart of the sentence, so we need to translate it somehow.
“prefer” is great, “rather” also works. Or even “instead”. But “love” by itself doesn’t have that.