2.14 Prepositions of place — in, auf, an, bei, zu, nach — Epoché
What you will be able to do Choose between the three German prepositions that all translate as English to — nach , zu , in — using the kind of destination rather than the English wording: Ich gehe nach Deutschland. , Er geht zum Arzt. , Er geht ins Konzert. Choose between the four that all translate as at or in — in , auf , an , bei — using the shape of the place: Er ist in der Küche. , Es ist auf dem Tisch. , Er stand an der Tür. , Sie ist bei mir. Recognise ten prepositions of place well enough to read them, and produce six of them. Say what this lesson is deliberately not teaching, and where in the course it is taught. Prerequisites : 2.13 — the imperative is the last of the clause patterns in this volume, and the sentences below are short statements built on those patterns. You also need the articles from lesson 2.3, because every preposition in this lesson appears fused with one, and you have to be able to see the article inside the fused form. This is the last lesson of the grammar volume in this phase, and it is the one where the mismatch between the two languages is widest. Prepositions do not translate. A German preposition and an English preposition are two independent carvings-up of the same space, and the boundaries fall in different places, so a one-to-one glossary is useless from the first line. What you need instead is a small number of questions to ask about the place you are talking about, and this lesson gives you those. The lesson also makes a promise it will not keep, and says so at the point where it breaks it. German prepositions govern cases: the article after a preposition changes shape, sometimes in a way that depends on whether there is movement. You have met two cases, there are two more, and the whole system is the subject of the fourth volume in the second phase. Until then you will meet the fused forms — zum , zur , ins , im , beim , am — as vocabulary items, and that is a deliberate decision rather than an oversight. How English does it English has one main preposition for destinations and three for locations. You go to everything: to Germany, to the doctor, to school, to the concert, to bed. And you are at , in or on something, with a rough division of labour — at for a point, in for an interior, on for a surface — that native speakers apply without thinking and cannot state. German has three for destinations and four for locations, and the boundaries between them do not line up with the English ones. So an English speaker translating to has a three-way choice with no English cue to guide it, and an English speaker translating at has a four-way choice in the same position. These are the two places where this lesson concentrates, because they are where the errors are. It is worth being precise about the size of the problem, because it is smaller than it first looks. English draws fine distinctions here too: at the table and on the table mean different things, just as am Tisch and auf dem Tisch do. English also has pairs where the difference is purely idiomatic and regional, such as whether one is in or on a street. So both languages have four-way choices in this area; they simply make them with different words and draw the lines in different places. You are not learning a harder system, you are learning a differently shaped one. There is one respect in which German is genuinely more demanding. English destination and location are often the same preposition with a different verb: I am at the doctor and I go to the doctor differ in the verb and in the preposition, but I am in the kitchen and I go in the kitchen can share a preposition. German changes the preposition, or changes the case after it, or both, and it does so consistently. Two pairs of sentences quoted below are exactly this: the same place with a verb of going and then with a verb of being, and in each pair the preposition is different. Learn the pairs rather than the words. A second point in the learner's favour is that German fuses prepositions with articles far more readily than English does anything comparable, and the fused forms are short, frequent and easy to recognise. Once you know that zum is zu plus a masculine or neuter article, and that zur is the same preposition plus a feminine one, a large amount of German prose becomes transparent at once. Those fused forms appear in eight of the sixteen sentences below. Three words for to The question to ask is what kind of destination it is. Three kinds, three prepositions. Preposition Use it when the destination is nach a country, a city or a continent named without an article; and the word for home zu a person, or an institution seen as an errand rather than as a building in somewhere you physically go inside; also a country whose name takes an article The first is the narrowest and therefore the easiest. Nearly every place name in German is used without an article, so nearly every place name takes this preposition, and the small set of exceptions is a matter of learning the names rather than the rule. The word for home is an idiom and simply has to be learned, and it is worth learning early because it is one of the commonest things anybody says. The second is the one to default to for everything human. If the destination is a person — a doctor, a friend, a grandmother, a hairdresser — this is the preposition, without exception. It also covers institutions when what you mean is the activity rather than the place: going to school means attending it, going to work means doing it, going to the doctor means being examined. One of the corpus sentences below uses it with the noun for work, where there is no building involved at all. The third is for going inside something, and the test is literal. You go inside a cinema, a concert hall, a room, a city centre; you do not go inside a doctor. Where both readings are available, both prepositions are available and they mean slightly different things, which is exactly the situation English is in with its