German laut and bei/am + Infinitive: Two Higher-Tier Prepositions
By Michael McGettrickUpdated 27 September 2026
Two unrelated German constructions share only the fact that most courses leave both until relatively late: the preposition , which reports where a claim comes from, and the pattern plus an infinitive, which turns any verb into a compact way of saying "while doing it".
Neither is difficult once isolated. Both are worth knowing because each replaces a clause English would need a full sentence for, and German readers, especially in the news, weather reports and instructions you will meet at GCSE Higher tier, use them constantly. Treat them as two small, separate tools to add to your kit rather than one connected topic, and neither should take long to feel comfortable.
laut: according to, plus the dative
reports the source of a claim, exactly like English according to, and in careful written German it takes the dative:
die .- According to the report, the situation is serious..- According to the newspaper, the new train arrives in May.Wetterbericht .- According to the weather report, it will rain tomorrow.
The dative shows up as with a masculine or neuter noun and with a feminine one, exactly as it would after or , which is worth remembering because behaves like an ordinary dative preposition even though it is taught later than or on most courses.
Before a proper name or an unmodified noun, is frequently used without any article at all, and this is at least as common as the version with a dative article:
Angela Merkel .- According to Angela Merkel, there is no alternative.Statistik die .- According to the statistics, the figures have risen.
You will also meet with the genitive, especially in official and journalistic writing ( ); dictionaries accept both cases. For your own writing, the dative is the safe choice, and it is the form the GCSE specification expects.
Where you meet laut: news, statistics, surveys
is the standard way German journalism attributes a claim to its source, so it is worth being able to recognise it fast in a reading exam as well as produce it in writing. Newspaper headlines and radio bulletins reach for it constantly, and it almost always sits at the very front of the sentence, immediately signalling that a claim is about to be reported rather than asserted directly:
die Sport.- According to a survey, most pupils like sport.war .- According to the police, the accident was not serious.
Recognising at the start of a sentence is a useful signal in itself: it tells you the sentence that follows is somebody else's claim, being reported, rather than a plain statement of fact, which matters for questions that ask you to identify whose opinion or information a text is presenting.
laut against zufolge: two ways to report a source
German has a second word for reporting a source, zufolge, and it is worth knowing alongside because it behaves almost the opposite way in the sentence. Zufolge also takes the dative, but it usually follows the noun rather than leading it:
die .- According to the report, the situation is serious.zufolge die .- According to the report, the situation is serious.
Both sentences mean the same thing, and both are correct written German; is the more common of the two and the safer default to produce yourself, while zufolge is worth recognising in reading so its reversed word order does not throw you the first time you meet it.
beim + infinitive: turning a verb into "while doing it"
German capitalises every infinitive and treats it as a neuter noun whenever the grammar calls for a noun rather than a verb, and one of the most useful places this shows up is straight after , contracted as usual with the dative article to :
(to eat) ->.- While eating, I never drink.(to study) ->.- While studying, I listen to music.(to work) ->Er .- He never talks while working.
A short object fuses onto the front of the infinitive-noun as one compound word: Deutschlernen (While learning German, I make a lot of mistakes). Once the object gets longer, German usually rephrases with a or clause instead, precisely because the nominalised infinitive reads most smoothly when it is short and bare, as in the examples above.
This whole construction is a compact substitute for a -clause. , and say the same thing; the second is shorter, and it is the version you will meet constantly in recipes, instructions and everyday speech.
More examples make the pattern easy to spot once you know to look for it:
.- While cooking, I always listen to music.man .- You don't phone while driving.er Faden.- While talking, he often loses the thread.
Any infinitive can become a das-noun, not only after beim
The pattern behind is bigger than just this one preposition. Capitalise any German infinitive, and it becomes an ordinary neuter noun on its own, usable anywhere a noun would be, not only tucked after :
.- Smoking is forbidden..- Learning a language takes time..- I love travelling.
+ infinitive is simply this general noun-making trick, applied after to build a "while doing it" meaning. Once you see the wider pattern, stops looking like a special exception and becomes one particular use of a tool that works everywhere in the language.
am + infinitive: the spoken progressive
Am plus an infinitive has a separate use worth knowing about so the two do not get confused. Combined with , it forms an everyday, informal way of saying that something is happening right now, roughly matching an English continuous tense:
am .- I am (in the middle of) working.Was ? am .- What are you doing? I'm cooking.
This "am-Progressiv", as it is sometimes called, is informal spoken German (it began as a western regional feature and has spread) rather than standard written German, and it is a different construction from + infinitive meaning "while doing something": the giveaway is the verb sitting in front of it. am reports what is happening now; describes what generally happens during the activity of working. Recognise both, but for GCSE purposes it is the "while/when doing something" pattern that matters most.
Mistakes English speakers make
Giving the accusative or leaving the noun unmarked when an article is present. copies the accusative pattern of or um; wants the dative, .
Treating after as only ever the noun "food". is genuinely ambiguous in isolation, since it is both the infinitive of and the ordinary noun for food. Context decides: is about the activity of eating, because it answers "while doing what?" rather than naming a dish.
Writing a full clause where the compact form would do. während ich esse, trinke ich nie is perfectly correct, but a fluent German speaker reaches for far more often. Once you can build the nominalised-infinitive version, prefer it for short, simple statements.
Confusing the am-Progressiv with -style reporting. The two constructions in this article do not interact with each other: introduces a source, never an activity, so it never combines with a nominalised infinitive. Keep them as two separate tools.
Forgetting to capitalise the nominalised infinitive. , lower case, looks like a stray verb rather than the noun the sentence needs. Every infinitive used as a noun is capitalised, exactly like any other German noun: , , .
What to do next
Learn as a straightforward dative preposition alongside the ones you already use, since its only real trick is remembering the case rather than any new sentence shape. Reading practice pays off here too: the moment you spot opening a sentence in a news text or a survey result, you already know a reported claim, not a direct statement, is coming. Practise , and as a set of three, since together they cover most of what a GCSE-level learner needs to say about routines and habits, and notice how often a -clause you might otherwise reach for can be swapped for the shorter version. The German course and subordinate clauses both give you the longer version first; this pattern is the shortcut once that feels solid.