German · Chapter 16 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer
Prepositions
Prescribed by the AQA specification - revisited.
The short version
Movement takes the accusative, location the dative
Nine German prepositions, including in, auf and an, can take either case. Ask whether the sentence answers where to or where. Going into town is in die Stadt, accusative. Being in town is in der Stadt, dative. The verbs help: legen and stellen move things, liegen and stehen leave them where they are.
Ich lege das Buch auf den Tisch. Das Buch liegt auf dem Tisch.
For two years is seit, not für
When something started in the past and is still going on, German uses seit with the present tense, where English uses the perfect with for. Für only covers a planned stretch of time, like a week you have booked. And ago is vor with the dative: vor einer Woche.
Ich wohne seit zwei Jahren hier.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
Read the full article · 9 min readPractice
Practise this lesson
10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 18 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 8 of 20 in this chapter