A Foundation Course in Reading German, 2017a

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Offline Textbook | A Foundation Course in Reading German https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/print-entire-textbook/ Page 37 of 151 12/8/2017 Die Sonne geht am Abend unter. The sun sets in the evening. Here is a list of common separable prefixes: ab off, down, away über over auf up, open um around aus out umher around ein in unter down empor up vor ahead, forward entgegen toward, to vorbei past, by fest fast, firm vorüber past fort away weg away heim home weiter on, farther her here, towards wieder back, again hin there, away from zu to, toward; shut mit along, with zurück back nieder down zusammen together You can see that prepositions are the most common separable prefix, and some are not prepositions at all. Your challenge is to use what you’ve learned so far about German syntax to recognize when a word is apparently functioning as a separated verbal prefix. Points to remember: 1. The prefix appears after the predicate. From now on you will need to finish reading to the end of each sentence or clause before you can be certain about the meaning of any conjugated verb. If you find a prefix there, you must associate it with the conjugated verb and consider the meaning of, for example, aufgehen, not of gehen. If you are trying to locate the verb in a dictionary, this can be a very important difference. 2. Likewise, you can decide whether a word appearing in the middle of a sentence is a verbal prefix or not by identifying the roles of the words after it – if they start a whole new statement, then perhaps this word is indeed a verbal prefix. Here’s an example in which a single subject is shared between two statements, both using a separable-prefix verb:
Offline Textbook | A Foundation Course in Reading German https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/print-entire-textbook/ Page 38 of 151 12/8/2017 Das Schiff saß auf der Sandbank fest und ging nicht weiter. The ship was stuck on the sandbar and went no further. Keep in mind that German punctuation rules do not call for a comma as often as English does, so you may not see a comma to help you decide whether the predicate has ended. 3. Most of the separable prefixes can be translated literally and will give you a simple meaning to a verb, e.g., ausgehen = to go out, to exit; vorübergehen = to go past, to pass by. 4. Sometimes verbs will have different meanings dependent upon whether the prefix is separable or not. The most common prefixes to play this double role are durch, über and unter. Your dictionary will indicate which verbs have this double role. Compare: Das Schiff setzt die Autos nach Japan über. The ship is transporting the cars to Japan. Er übersetzt das Buch ins Englische. He is translating the book into English. Look up übersetzen in your dictionary to see how it describes the difference between the separable and the inseparable verbs. Unit: 4: Verbs with prefixes; adjective endings 4. Adjective Endings You learned in Unit 3 how endings are added to the der– and ein– words. In addition, German adds endings to regular attributive adjectives when they are modifying a noun. Recognizing these endings can sometimes be a crucial reading skill in order to detect the case and number of a noun. Noun Phrases without an Article When a noun phrase does not begin with either a der– word or an ein– word, then essentially any adjectives have to take their place as far as providing signals to you about the case, number, and gender of the noun they are modifying. The chart or “paradigm” below shows what happens to the adjectives if we take the three nouns der Wein, die Milch, and das Bier and describe them with the simple adjectives rot (red), frisch (fresh) and kalt (cold):
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A Foundation Course in Reading German, 2017a

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