Die Präpositionen 2

Prepositions are words like at, for, on, over or during. They are words that tell you how a noun or a pronoun in a sentence relates to the rest of the sentence. He lives in Morecambe. The cat is on the mat. You will find prepositions in sentences. I will give some examples to you. Prepositions are everywhere so I will stop putting them in bold, but they are not always obvious when translating from English to German. You may find some falsche Freunde.

There is an added difficulty in German because the noun that follows the preposition has to be in a specific case, either accusative, dative or genitive, and some prepositons use more than one case. Take the preposition auf. This can take the accusative case and it can also take the dative. The difference is that if there is a sense of movement then you use the accusative. If a location is described then you use the dative. So the cat is on the mat - it's dative, die Katze ist auf der Matte. It doesn't quite have the same ring in German.

Bis bald