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Sentence Structure II

What you need to know

A sentence in German can consist of quite a few elements depending on how much information we want to convey. You could share information about a specific direction or location or about a reason for your doing or a specific way in which you want to do things. You could also make clear who will be affected by your or someone else's action or who receives what. That all might sound overwhelming but luckily the German language offers you a solid order in which to put things. Let me walk you through a couple of grammatical terms:

  • Temporal - think of "tempo" = speed hence information about time. Ask: "When/What time?"
  • Kausal - think of "cause" = origin/reason hence information about "Why" things are being done?
  • Modal - think of "mode" = way/manner in which things are being done. Think of "How?"
  • Lokal - think of "local" = place in which things will end or happen. The question for this is "Where or Where to?"

But let's start with the most common situation of a sentence with more than just Subject Verb Object (SVO):

Ich schenke meinem Vater ein Buch.

If we take this sentence apart we get:

Ich = subject
schenke = verb
meinem Vater = Dative or indirect object
ein Buch = Accusative or direct object &

As you can see we have two objects here, an accusative one and a dative one. That's also the maximum amount of objects a sentence can have (let's ignore the genitive for now).

The reason why this sentence can take two objects lie in the verb. There is only a limited amount of verbs that can take two objects. Luckily they are easy to spot as they exist in some form or the other in all languages in this universe. Even on Mars, whenever a Marsian son would give his Marsian father a book you'd have two "objects": the Marsian father and a book.

By the way, the word "object" is not used in the sense of "thing" but rather as an element of a sentence. And not always is a object in German also a grammatical object in English. But don't worry about such details.

Frequent verbs that can (!) take two objects are:
jm = jemandem = somebody (in dative)

  • (mit)bringen
  • geben
  • sagen
  • erzählen=to tell sb sth
  • zeigen=to show sb sth
  • jm etwas wünschen=to wish sb sth
  • jm etwas verraten=to give sth away (e.g. a secret) to sb
  • sich etwas waschen=to wash oneself a body part

Back to our sample sentence from above. With two objects the question arises in which order they shall appear. There are several possibilities:

1. Ich schenke meinem Vater ein Buch.
Dativ before Akkusativ or DADA (I just doubled the DA for emphasis)

2. Ich schenke ihm ein Buch.
Dativ before Akkusativ = DADA (as before)

3. Ich schenke es meinem Vater.
Akkusativ (personal pronoun) before Dativ

4. Ich schenke es ihm.
Akkusativ (personal pronoun) before Dativ

So there are only two things to remember are:

A: Accusative personal pronouns (mich, dich, ihn, es, sie, uns, euch, Sie) first.
B: Otherwise the German sentence order is pretty DADA.

If there's more information to deal with

While you could theoretically create extremely long sentences in German, I can only recommend to not overdo this. 2-3 elements will do the job in 99% of the cases. So, the following is rather just to cover the theory of how to construct a natural sounding sentence in German and in the end I'll simplify everything into a single handy rule. Bereit? Auf geht's:

Here's a sentence that you will never find in the wild. Can you recognize already how many elements there are?

Ich fahre am Montag wegen ihres Geburtstags mit dem Auto zu meiner Mutter.

You might remember the grammatical terms that I have lead you through in the beginning of this lesson. Here they are again:

Temporal = Wann?
Kausal = Warum?
Modal = Wie?
Lokal = Wo(hin/her)?

If you now take a look at the sentence above you'll notice four elements (I usually don't count the subject in) with help of these questions:

Ich fahre am Montag wegen ihres Geburtstags mit dem Auto zu meiner Mutter.

There is a nice mnemonic image to remember this order as you might have seen already in the video and that is the German Tee-Kamel. A German camel that only drinks tea and if it drinks tea, the world in is order.

As said before, you are very unlikely to even come across such a sentence and you'll certainly never have to create one yourself. Yet, what IS very common is the following combination of elements:

Ich fahre am Montag (=time) zu meiner Mutter (=place).

And therefore we can break the Tee-Kamel down to the simple rule:

time before place
or as we say in German
Zeit vor Ort.

This topic is covered in: B2-L03