7.6 Drei Kurznachrichten — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read three real German news reports, about science, culture and archaeology, in their original wording. Recognise the grammar of news German: the perfect in the lead, the simple past in the body, the passive, and reported speech. Take apart the long compounds of journalism: Restaurierungsarbeiten, Knochenfragmenten, Forscherteam . Read for the main facts first — who, what, where, when — before worrying about every word. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the German aloud; all of them come back below. German English Die Studie unterstreicht die Wichtigkeit der Seegraswiesen. The study underlines the importance of the seagrass meadows. Eine Studie von Forschern der Universität Barcelona hat ergeben, dass sogenannte „Neptunbälle“ … eine bedeutende Rolle beim Sammeln und Entfernen von Plastikmüll aus dem Mittelmeer spielen. A study by researchers at the University of Barcelona has found that so-called Neptune balls play an important role in collecting and removing plastic waste from the Mediterranean. Die Untersuchung, geleitet von der Meeresbiologin Anna Sanchez-Vidal, konzentrierte sich auf die Seegrasart Posidonia oceanica. The study, led by the marine biologist Anna Sanchez-Vidal, focused on the seagrass species Posidonia oceanica. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass diese … Bälle Mikroplastik vom Meeresboden aufnehmen. The results show that these balls take up microplastics from the sea floor. Sanchez-Vidal betonte jedoch, dass dieser natürliche Prozess keine Lösung für das globale Plastikproblem darstellt. Sanchez-Vidal stressed, however, that this natural process is no solution to the global plastic problem. Die Kathedrale war am 15. April 2019 durch einen verheerenden Brand schwer beschädigt worden. The cathedral had been badly damaged by a devastating fire on 15 April 2019. Prerequisites : 12.1 — this is the first reading of the second phase. You need the simple past from 3.9 Verbs and 3.10 Verbs , the pluperfect from 3.11 Verbs , the passive from 2.19 Grammar , and the compound method from 5.11 Vocabulary . About this text The three reports come from Wikinews, the free news site of the Wikimedia movement, written by volunteers and published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. They are real news German, written for adult native readers, not for learners. The first, from September 2025, reports a Spanish study of the balls of seagrass fibre that wash up on Mediterranean beaches and turn out to carry microplastics out of the sea. The second, from December 2024, reports the reopening of Notre-Dame in Paris five years after the fire. The third, from January 2025, reports that researchers in Leipzig decoded the oldest known genomes of modern humans, from bones found in caves in Thuringia and the Czech Republic. Each report has been shortened: some paragraphs are left out, and the wiki formatting is removed. The sentences that remain are exactly as published. That makes this text harder than anything in the first phase, and deliberately so. The aim is not to understand every word on the first reading, but to find the facts, and then to look closely at how the sentences are built. How news German is built Perfect in the lead, simple past in the body. A German news report often opens with the perfect, which presents the news as a result that matters now: Eine Studie … hat ergeben , ein … Forscherteam … hat … entschlüsselt . The narrative that follows switches to the simple past: konzentrierte sich , öffnete , klopfte , lebten . English does the same, with has found in the headline sentence and was or focused after it. The passive, and the pluperfect passive. News is about events, and often the doer does not matter. Look for werden with a participle: werden … zu dichten Kugeln geformt , gefunden wurden , verlegt werden . The second report has a pluperfect passive: war … beschädigt worden , had been damaged , built exactly as 3.11 Verbs and 2.19 Grammar would predict. Reported speech. Two sentences report what someone said without quoting them, and their verbs look unusual: müsse , stehe , würden . These are forms of the subjunctive that German uses in reported speech, which you will meet in 2.26 Grammar . For now, read them as the ordinary verbs muss , steht , werden , with the meaning according to her or according to him . Long noun phrases. One sentence contains diese aus abgefallenen Pflanzenblättern entstehenden Bälle , literally these from fallen plant leaves arising balls . German can put a whole clause between the article and its noun. Read it from the noun outwards: these balls, which arise from fallen plant leaves . This construction is the subject of 2.28 Grammar ; here it is enough to recognise it. Reading it a second time, report by report Paragraphs 1–5, the Neptune balls. The lead gives the finding; the second paragraph explains how the balls form; the third and fourth give the researcher's caution and advice. Notice the quotation marks: German opens with low marks and closes with high ones, „like this“. Inside the fourth paragraph, nicht nur … sondern auch means not only … but also . Paragraphs 6–9, Notre-Dame. The lead sets the time, the place and the background in two sentences. The ceremony is told in the simple past. The last paragraph moves to the future with the passive: Es werden … erwartet , are expected , with the placeholder es from 2.20 Grammar . Paragraphs 10–12, the oldest genome. The relative clauses are the challenge here: die in der Ilsenhöhle … gefunden wurden , die vor 42.000 bis 49.000 Jahren gelebt haben , and a double one in the last paragraph. Find each die after a comma, then jump to the verb at the end of its clause, as in 2.15 Grammar . Large numbers use a full stop where English uses a comma. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. "Neptune balls