Guus Bosman

I went to my second lesson of the German course tonight. Part of today's homework assignment was to write a letter of complaint to a travel organization. I spent quite some time on it this weekend and it was a great exercise. It had been many years since I wrote a German text!

I sent my homework assignment by e-mail yesterday, and in the morning I received the result by e-mail. There were still quite some mistakes in it, but it wasn't as bad as I had thought.

In the course tonight we spoke again about prepositions. First of all, you have to learn when to use which preposition (zu, in, nach, an...). Second, you have to find out which case should be used with the selected preposition. With some prepositions it's easy, for example zu and von always have the 3rd case, the Dativ.

However, the prepositions we looked at these lessons are a bit more complicated. They're called the Wechselpräpositionen. In general the rule is: Wo? implies Dativ, Wohin? implies Akkusativ, but there are some exceptions. The verb 'to float' (schweben), might feel like a Wohin?-type of verb, but it actually comes with the Dativ. That's language for you.

Tonight we did various exercises, and practiced conversation with the newly learned rules; it was a fun evening.