German · Chapter 2 · Lesson 23 · Themed review
Jetzt, heute, morgen
Time words: when, how often, how long, and since when. German builds its sense of time out of short adverbs rather than tenses, so these carry more of the load than their English equivalents do.
Practise this lesson
20-word session
A quick mix of exercises - recognise, recall, type and build each word. Miss one and it comes back round until it sticks.
Worth knowing
Jetzt, heute, morgen: how German talks about time
English leans on its tenses to say when something happens. German leans on its adverbs. A German speaker will happily say , I come tomorrow, and let the word carry the future that English insists on building with will. Learn the time words and a surprising amount of the tense system looks after itself.
The day and the clock
is day, is night, is evening, is year, and is time in the sense of the stuff you never have enough of. is today and is tomorrow.
Watch the capital letter on that last one. Lower-case is tomorrow; the noun is morning. So , tomorrow morning, is correct and sounds like a typing error. Germans usually dodge it with .
Now, then, and in a moment
is now. is then, in the sense of next, and it is how German stories move forward: this happened, that happened.
, and Moment all concern the very near future, and they are not quite the same. means immediately, this second. means shortly, in a minute, and it is what a waiter says when you will be waiting a while. Moment on its own, often as Moment , means hang on.
means just, or right now: is I am eating at the moment. German has no continuous tense, and is one of the ways it does that job.
How often
is always, is never, is again. is the little word for a time, an occasion, and it also turns up to soften commands: her, come here a sec.
How long, and since when
is for a long time, and is before, sending its verb to the end like and .
is the one to learn properly. It means since, or for, and it takes the present tense where English uses the perfect. is I have lived here for a year, but word for word it says I live here since a year. The German logic is sound: you still live there, so it is present. English speakers get this wrong for years, and the cure is to hear it until the English version sounds odd.