German · Chapter 8 · Lesson 7 · Grammar primer

Da compounds

Prescribed by the AQA specification.

The short version

German fuses 'on it' into one word: darauf

Preposition plus es is not how German expresses on it, with it or for it when it refers to a thing. Instead the preposition fuses onto da, or dar before a vowel, giving one compact word that does the whole job.

Ich warte darauf.

I am waiting for it.

Da-compounds never point at a person

The moment the noun being replaced is a human being rather than a thing or idea, German drops the da-compound and goes back to an ordinary preposition plus personal pronoun. daran never means about my sister; an sie does.

Ich denke daran. Ich denke an sie.

I am thinking about it. I am thinking about her.

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 read

Practice

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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 7 of 13 in this chapter

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