Als Thomas gesehen hat, dass das Gesichtspeeling im Angebot ist, hat er vor Freude geweint.Now, the idea of potential danger works for most of the vor-verbs but there’s one useful phrasing that’s not limited to danger. Seriously though, the general theme of all these verbs is stationary. So it would sound like the gazelles run in front of the lions on purpose. Suicidal gazelles – that would be a good name for a hipster band.
I mean, the fleeing gazelles are clearly making a move with a destination, so Dativedoesn’t seem like a good fit. BUT if we were to use Accusative, we would mark “in front of the lions” as the destination of the fleeing. Usually Accusative is much more common for these fixed verb-prep-combos, but as the color in the examples already hinted at, the vor-combos all go with Dative. We’ve learned that vor is a two-way preposition, so it could go with Dative or Accusative. It’s been a long article :).īut yeah, the gazelle example can help us understand something else. Now they have to pay for their ignorance. Gee, what am I saying. The relativity of language gazelles never cared. That’s when the lions turned their heads, turning behind to in front of in the blink of an eye. Like… if they were behind the lions, they could be all chill like “Pffff, these dumb lions. The fleeing gazelles are literally “ in front of” the lions.
And if we take the last example, that actually makes a lot of sense. All these verbs revolve around the idea of potential danger. That’s the main theme of verb-combos with vor. That won’t always work, but for vor, there is a theme and we actually don’t need much mind yoga to see it. So in this section, we’ll learn the most common combos for our preposition and see if there are any underlying themes to those combos. There is no logic or system to it and you just have to learn over time which preposition a certain verb would like to have.īut we can at least try to bring some order into the chaos. The English to wait goes with for, the German warten goes with auf. The problem with these combos is that most of them do not match up!!! And before you start hyperventilating – it is nothing particularly German. English has these combos, too: t o wait for, to be angry about, to be scared of. There’s another way to combine verb and preposition. I’m talking about Fixed Verb-Preposition Combinations. Now you might be like “Wait, we already talked about prefixes?!” but that’s not what I mean. When you start learning German, it doesn’t take very long before you discover something that’ll frustrate you for… well… ever. I’ll add the links below so you can check those out in more detail.īut now let’s get to the “Königsdisziplin” of prepositions, as we say in German the end boss if you will.
#Them prepo series#
And we’ve covered some of the most important vor-verbs in the series on prefix verbs to do them justice. Of course, we didn’t cover all the aspects and there are other important vor-verbs but this was really to get a “feel”. So this was a little overview of what vor- and I hope you got a good impression of what it does with the ideas of ahead and in front. Vornehmen and vorhaben are super common for these daily life plans and you should definitely add them to your vocab. (“in front of the café” is where my waiting takes place.) Dative if you want to mark something as a location where something happens, Accusative if you want to mark it as the destination of something. In a nutshell it’s like this: two-way prepositions can be followed by Dative or Accusative.
If you don’t know what that is or if you’re uncertain about them, you really should check out my article about the topic. And that is the question which case to use.Īnd vor is one of those lovely two-way prepositions.
Now, there’s one more thing that we need to talk about before we move on to vor as a prefix – the elephant in the room of prepositions, if you will. This distinction is a pretty important one and I’ve talked about it in more detail in an article another article, so I’ll add the link below. D uring connects things, while connects actions. They both express “simultanous-ness” but they’re not interchangeable because of their grammatical function. The English b efore has both functions but German usually uses distinct words for distinct functions. Connecting actions is the job of conjunctions and in our case, the word we need is bevor. But here, we’re connecting an action/a verb (schlafen gehen). The thing is, that vor is a prepositions and as such, it can only connect “things”. Before is a bit tricky though and leads to one super uber mega common mistake. So in front of, before and ago… those are the main translations for vor.