German · Chapter 17 · Lesson 9 · Grammar primer
Separable verbs word order
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
Separable verbs split only when they are conjugated
anrufen sends an to the end in a simple present-tense sentence, but the moment a modal verb or werden appears, anrufen becomes an infinitive and stays in one piece at the end instead. Ask which verb is actually conjugated in the sentence, and the split-or-whole question answers itself.
Ich rufe dich an. Ich muss dich anrufen.
In a weil clause, the infinitive comes before the modal
A subordinate clause already sends its verb to the end, so a separable verb plus a modal both land there together, and the order is fixed: the infinitive first, the conjugated modal last of all. weil ich dich muss anrufen reverses it; say weil ich dich anrufen muss.
weil ich dich anrufen muss
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 · 8 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 16 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 9 of 15 in this chapter