2.8 Separable verbs — the prefix flies to the end — Epoché
What you will be able to do Build the present tense of a separable verb: strip the prefix off the front of the infinitive, conjugate what is left, and put the prefix at the end of the clause. Decide from the stress of a verb whether its prefix will come off at all, so that you treat aufstehen and verstehen differently without having to look them up. Recognise thirty of the commonest separable verbs, grouped by prefix, and say what each prefix contributes to the meaning of the base verb. Read a long German clause to the end before you decide what the verb means, because the last word may still change it. Prerequisites : 2.7 — you need the inversion of the question, because a separable verb behaves the same way in a question as in a statement: the conjugated part moves and the prefix stays at the end. The rule that the verb comes second is the other half of what this lesson builds on. This is the lesson where German stops looking like a rearranged English and starts looking like a language with a shape of its own. The device is simple to state. A large class of German verbs is built from a short particle plus a plain verb, and in most tenses that particle refuses to travel with the verb. It detaches, waits at the end of the clause, and only there tells you what the verb actually meant. Take the verb for getting out of bed. The infinitive is aufstehen , one word, prefix and verb fused. Put it into a sentence with a subject and it comes apart: the verb is conjugated and placed second, and the prefix travels to the far end. Three words, and the second and the third belong to the same verb. Infinitive In a clause aufstehen — to get up ich stehe auf — I get up anrufen — to phone ich rufe an — I phone zuhören — to listen ich höre zu — I listen mitkommen — to come along ich komme mit — I come along Those four short forms are paradigm fragments written for this lesson, not sentences from the corpus; every full sentence in this lesson is quoted. How English does it English has the same raw material and handles it in the opposite direction. You also build verbs out of a plain verb plus a small particle: get up , call up , listen to , come along , pick up , turn off , throw away . Grammars call them phrasal verbs, and there are thousands of them. The difference is where the particle sits relative to the verb. In English the particle starts after the verb and stays roughly there. It can be pushed a little further back by a pronoun object — turn it off , pick her up — but it never leaves the neighbourhood of the verb, and it is never part of the infinitive. You write to pick up as two words. German writes the same idea as one word in the dictionary and then flings the particle to the end of the clause when the verb is used. So the two languages agree that verb plus particle is a productive way of making new meanings, and they disagree about word order in exactly the way they disagree everywhere else: English keeps the pieces of a verb together, German is willing to stretch a verb across a whole clause. This is the same habit you met as the sentence bracket in lesson 2.2. There, an auxiliary held one end and a participle or an infinitive held the other. Here the prefix does the holding, and the bracket is made out of a single verb that has been pulled in two. The practical consequence for an English speaker is a reading habit rather than a rule. When you read English you know what the verb means as soon as you have read the verb and the next word or two. When you read German you do not, because the word that decides the meaning may be a dozen words away. I am closing the door is settled by word three; the German for it is not settled until the last word of the clause. Train yourself to wait. The second consequence is that English translations of separable verbs are usually phrasal verbs, which makes the vocabulary easier than it looks. The prefix and the English particle often match: the German word for out is the prefix in the verb for going out, the German word for on is the prefix in the verb for putting clothes on, the German word for back is the prefix in the verb for coming back. Learn the ten prefixes and you can guess a great many verbs. There is one place where English is the odd one out rather than German. English sometimes splits a phrasal verb and sometimes does not, and which of the two you get depends on whether the object is a pronoun and on how long it is. Nobody says turn off it , and nobody says turn the lights that we left on in the hall off either. German has no such hesitation: the prefix goes at the end, whatever is in between and however long it is. In this one respect the German rule is the simpler of the two. Stress decides, not the spelling German has two kinds of prefix, and nothing on the page distinguishes them. The pair the syllabus asks you to separate is the clearest case: one verb means to get up and the other means to understand, and they are built on the same base verb. One comes apart and the other does not. What tells them apart is where the word is stressed. In a separable verb the prefix carries the main stress, so the verb is pronounced with the push on its first syllable: AUFstehen , ANrufen , MITkommen . In an inseparable verb the prefix is unstressed and the push falls on the base verb: verSTEHen , beKOMMen , erZÄHLen . The capitals here mark the stressed syllable, because the spelling itself gives nothing away. That is not an accident of history that you have to memorise separately. It follows from what the two sets of prefixes are. The separable ones are independent words in their own right: each of them also exists on its own as a preposition or an adverb, and you have already met most of them in that role. A word that can stand alone keeps its own stress, and a word with its own stress can be moved. The inseparable ones are not words at all. They exist only as prefixes, they have no meaning you can point at, and they are stuck. Separable — prefix is stresse