About the German grammar you can find already a lot of stuff on the web, and many issues are just repeated in always different forms. I don’t want to add more of those. Instead, I want to point out some matters they might be difficult to find in a normal grammar, all these exceptions, borderline things, aspects prone to misunderstanding that make a language so special, at least to me.

German is a weird language

Look at a normal German sentence like this:

Morgen möchte ich zusammen mit meiner Freundin nach Hamburg fahren.

(Tomorrow want I together with my friend to Hamburg go.)

Still quite short – it could be much worse – just to start with something which does not put off everybody immediately. The question is, when do we grasp the meaning of a sentence? Exactly at the end of the sentence, and only there. You have to listen to or read through all this other stuff, more or less interesting, in order to know what is going on.

In the sentence above, something is happening tomorrow together with my friend, and then there is Hamburg, but what the hell is going on?  Finally, the very last word, ahhh, fahren. Couldn’t we say that a little bit earlier? No, we couldn’t. That is German. The most important things are just at the end. Always. Oh, that is maybe why we always have to finish everything, even if we don’t like it. For example, I cannot stop reading a book, even though it is a terrible one. And it does not end here. Let’s see another one:

Morgen früh bereite ich mich auf die Prüfung, die am Nachmittag stattfindet, vor.

(Tomorrow prepare (1st part) I myself on the exam, which in the afternoon place take, prepare (2nd part). Tomorrow morning, I will prepare for the exam, which will take place in the afternoon.

In a sentence with a separable verb, the second sentence position is always occupied by the main verb and the prefix is on the very last position, even if there is a whole relative clause in between. No problem for Germans? No, problem at all.  Admittedly, somebody would also say:

Morgen bereite ich mich auf die Prüfung vor, die am Nachmittag stattfindet.

This sentence has the advantage that the prefix ‘vor’ isn’t too far away from its stem ‘bereiten’, but we gained the disadvantage of having the relative pronoun ‘die’ separated from its reference word ‘Prüfung’. This is actually not a huge problem, and probably there might be two groups of native speakers preferring one or the other option.  And then the past tense:

Gestern bin ich zusammen mit meinen Freunden im Kino gewesen.

(Yesterday am (have) I together with my friends to the movies been.)

Again, I am doing something together with my friends, at the cinema, and only at the end we discover that the beginning ‘ich bin…’  does not mean ‘I am’, but is just one part of the past tense. Compare the sentence:

Jetzt bin ich zusammen mit meinen Freunden im Kino.

Of course, we got the hint ‘gestern’ (yesterday). But only the very last word tells us what is going on: I have been at the movies together with my friends.

The German grammar is just awful and has nothing to do with meaning?

I just read a post encouraging somebody to study German by saying how terribly difficult it is. The argumentation went like this: First, there are the capital letters, always used with a noun, but there are also quite a few other cases, which are difficult to understand why they are considered nouns. In fact, linguists have a word for them: they are just nominalized. It means, verbs and adjectives can be transformed into a noun.

Then there is the issue with the ‘Umlaut’. I liked the example. ‘schön’ means beautiful, but ‘schon’ means already. Well, still to remember, isn’t it? But then we got ‘schönen’, which is still beautiful, but just declined, so the Akkusativ, but we also got ‘schonen’, which has nothing to do with already, it just means to have a rest. One could say:

Du solltest dich schon schonen.

where ‘schon’ doesn’t mean already, but it is more something to emphasize the given suggestion, and here we are at a different question: the ambiguity of many words. But this is not a problem of German, but I suppose of every natural language in this world.

Anyway, the German language loves these words which we call ‘Modalpartikel’. They all have no meaning themselves, but quite often they are necessary. Let’s see some examples where the degree of acceptability increases with the number of the ‘Modalpartikel’.

Kommen Sie rein!

Kommen Sie bitte rein! Kommen Sie doch rein!

Kommen Sie doch bitte rein!

The first sentence is pretty rude, in the polite form (‘Sie’) it seems possible only in a context as the military or similar situations where a real command can be given. In the second example, ‘bitte’ and ‘doch’ have more or less the same function ( in other contexts they won’t): to make the invitation sound more polite.

After being lost in other considerations,  I should now come back to the main question: Does grammar express meaning? Sometimes, it does.

Ich ziehe um.

Ich ziehe mich um.

Two different verbs with two different meanings, and nevertheless, the difference seems to be only a grammatical one, but it is far away from that.

‘umziehen’ means to move house, while ‘sich umziehen’ means to get changed (clothes). So, both have some kind of change at the bottom of their meaning, which comes obviously from the prefix ‘um-‘, as one can see in other words like ‘umsteigen’: change some public means of transport. Admittedly, there are not many verbs like the example, and most of them are connected to them:

‘ausziehen’ (to move out) against ‘sich ausziehen’ (to get undressed).

Moving on, we will find other verbs, behaving not exactly in the same way.

Ich interessiere mich für Musik.

Musik interessiert mich.

Here, the meaning is the same, but  what has changed is that the subject and the object had swapped their place. In a sentence with  ‘sich interessieren für’,  the subject is the person who is interested in, while the thing somebody is interested in is the subject of the verb ‘interessieren’ (with the person being the object, or Akkusativ in German). Confusing? Well, the German grammar … We got some other verbs of this kind (sich freuen – freuen, sich ärgern – ärgern, sich ängstigen – ängstigen etc.)

Then there are all the verbs where the body is involved.

Ich wasche mich. (sich waschen)

Ich wasche mir die Haare. (sich etwas waschen)

Ich wasche meine Haare. (etwas waschen. If a part of the body is involved, one must use either the reflexive or the possessive pronoun)

In the spoken language, somebody might use both:

Ich wasche mir meine Haare. (redundant, because it refers to the body twice: mir, meine)

And least but not last, the pure reflexive verbs (where the meaning of the reflexive pronoun is not anymore visible).

Sie kümmert sich um die Kinder, und er beschäftigt sich mit einem neuen Projekt.

Finally, the so-called reciprocal verbs. They must be plural, because almost two or more people doing something together.

Wir unterhalten uns.

Which cannot be the plural of  ‘ich unterhalte mich’, but it means: I am chatting with the other person, and the other person is chatting with me.

‘wir waschen uns’ can’t be a reciprocal verb, because it can’t have the meaning of: I am washing the other person, and the other person is washing me. But: I am washing myself, and the other person is washing him/herself.

Grammar and meaning can be quite the opposite – sometimes

Let’s have a look at the comparative.

Thomas ist 5 Jahre alt, Peter 7. (Thomas is 5 years old, Peter 7)

Obviously: Peter ist älter als Thomas. (Peter is older than Thomas)

So far so good. After this introduction one might presume that ‘älter’ is more than ‘alt’. Far from that. You will regret if you tell a 60 or 70 years old woman, she is an ‘alte Dame’ (old lady). Of course, she is not, she is just an ‘ältere Dame’ (older lady) – nowadays, even this would be rejected by an always growing number of women. Then, who would be the ‘alte Dame’? She must be at least 90 or very close to her end, otherwise it is just an offense. With the result that an ‘ältere Dame’ is actually younger than the ‘alte Dame’, contradiction to the grammar rule. This looks like an exception, but it is not: ‘Eine größere Stadt’  is definitely smaller than ‘eine große Stadt’. ‘Ein kleineres Problem’ (a smaller problem) is not for sure smaller than ‘ein kleines Problem’ (a small problem) and so on.

German has tones – like Chinese?

Of course, German is not considered a tone language, in fact, in most of the cases it is not. What does tone language means? In German, as in many other languages, in opposite to Chinese, you can pronounce a word however you like, the meaning will remain the same. Say: Haus (or house) with a very high voice, or with a very deep one, or going up and down, it will always be a house. In Chinese, the tone changes everything, using a different tone you say something else. And this should also happen in German? Yes, it does, at least sometimes.

Studying German, there will come the time where one has to battle his way through the jungle of separable and inseparable verbs. There is a list dividing the separable prefixes from the inseparable ones. The list is quite long, but that is what most lists are.  Unfortunately, the issue does not end here. There is a third group, and these prefixes are capricious. Sometimes they do separate and sometimes they don’t. How can one know? You can’t, unless you know how to pronounce them. Here comes into play the pronunciation, not exactly the tone, but the stress on a certain syllable. This is quite important in German, in order to get the right sound, but usually it won’t change the meaning of a word. Here are some examples where the meaning of the word depends on its pronunciation:

übersetzen – übersetzen

Ich übersetze das Buch vom Deutschen ins Englische (I am translating the book from German into English.)

The verb is not separable, and the meaning is to translate. The stress is on the main verb, not on the prefix.

Das Schiff setzt nach Helgoland über. (The ship crosses over to Helgoland)

The verb is separable, the meaning is to cross over, and the stress is on the prefix.

One can see the relationship, both verbs have something in common: to go from one point to another, in the case of the separable verb in a concrete sense, in the other case an abstract meaning. But what about ‘umfahren’ or ‘umfahren’? Are they related? Yes, more or less by the opposite meaning.

Er hat die Stadt umfahren. (We drove round the town.)

Er hat das Schild umgefahren. (He knocked down the street sign.)

Then three different verbs ‘umgehen’:

1. Er geht immer freundlich mit den Kunden um. (separable: to treat, to deal with))

2. Die Angst geht um. (separable: to spread)

3. Sie umgeht immer Konflikte mit ihren Kollegen. (inseparable: to avoid)

‘um’ as a prefix has very often the meaning of around something.  In the first sentence there is ‘ to go around somebody’, so how to treat people or to deal with them. The second meaning is something like ‘the fear goes around’ ,so it is spreading between the people. The third one is something like ‘how to go around a problem’, so how to avoid it.

durchlaufen –  durchlaufen

Das Projekt durchläuft verschiedene Phasen. (The project passes several phases.)

Hier ist der Tunnel. Da laufen wir durch. (Here is the tunnel. We will go through.)

And so on.

Why German has many words to express the same meaning?

Maybe in order to be precise, or the context, in which a word or an expression is used, is an important issue. What is the difference between ‘vor, bevor, davor’ and ‘vorher’?

Se first two are easy to distinguish:

‘vor’ is a preposotion, therefor used with a noun, either in a time expression or in a local expression.

Vor dem Abendessen sieht er fern.

Wir treffen uns vor dem Kino.

‘bevor’ is quite similar, but is a conjunction in a secondary sentence, and it can be used only to express time, not a place.

Bevor er zu Abend isst, sieht er fern.

‘davor’ and ‘vorher’ are more tricky ones. Both are adverbials with the same meaning, but not with the same point of reference. What does that mean? To understand this, we must very quickly introduce the two notions of deixis and anaphora. According to Wikipedia, words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denotational meaning varies depending on time and/or place. That means that we can understand their semantic meaning, but we need a reference point which is outside the text. This point for ‘vorher’ is now. Therefore we could have this dialogue:

A: Was hast du vorher gemacht. ( vorher = before now)

B: Vorher habe ich geputzt.

The situation is completely different for ‘davor’, which is an anaphora, meaning that it must refer to another word somewhere in the text.

Um 5 war ich beim Friseur und davor habe ich eingekauft.

‘davor’ refers to ‘ um 5’ or even the whole situation that the person has been at the hairdressers at 5.

This is what happens always with the particle ‘da-‘. It refers to something which appeared in the text before.

So, while the reference point of ‘vorher’ is outside the text, in the situation, the reference point of ‘davor’ is in the text.

The same can be said about ‘nachher’ and ‘danach’.

Nachher gehe ich ins Kino. (nachher= after now)

The reference point can be at the same time inside and outside the text if the time the speakers are referring to is now.

Jetzt bin ich noch zu Hause. Danach/Nachher gehe ich ins Kino.

According to this distinction, both are okay, and in fact, both are used: ‘danach’ refers to the text, while ‘nachher’ refers to the situation, in which the sentence is uttered, so now.

‘nachdem’ corrisponds to ‘bevor’, it is a conjunction, with a small differnce.

While in a sentence with ‘bevor’, we don’t care so much about the right time, we do with ‘nachdem’.

Bevor ich ins Bett gehe, lese ich ein Buch.

Bevor ich ins Bett gegangen bin, habe ich ein Buch gelesen.

In both parts of the sentences, the same time is used, even if the main sentence where ‘ich’ is/was reading a book, is in terms of time before the other part. With ‘nacdem’, the time sequence must be followed more strictly:

Nachdem ich ein Buch gelesen habe, gehe ich ins Bett. (nachdem + Perfekt, main sentence + Präsens)

Nachdem ich ein Buch gelesen hatte, ging ich ins Bett/bin ich ins Bett gegangen. (nachdem + Plusquamperfekt, main sentence + Präteritum, in the spoken language also with Perfekt).