Three-storey sentences: how every verb gets closed
CEFR C1
The same thing said to a friend and said in a reportChoosing between two forms that are both correct. Spoken German uses weil with the verb…The German that turns verbs into nounsTurning a verb clause into a noun phrase and back, which is what separates school German…Words that look like yours and are not, and the ones that travel in pairsThe two things that make a correct text sound wrong. False friends —Gymnasium is not a…Daumen drücken, ins Wasser fallen: the bits that do not translateThe expressions a German uses without thinking and that you cannot work out: die Daumen…Reading German aloud: ei, ie, z, v, w, chReading any German word aloud, knowing which letters sound different from how they are…Every noun takes a capital letterCapitalising every noun, and using those capitals when reading to find what a long…The rule, in three lines
Writing and above all READING the long German sentence, the one with a clause inside a clause and three verbs piled up at the end. Obwohl er wusste, dass sie kommen würde, ging er. Plus the C1 concessives: wenn auch, so … doch, and auch wenn against wenn auch.
The usual slip. Losing count of the verbs and closing the last one wrongly, which in German leaves the sentence meaningless rather than merely odd. And when reading, giving up: the technique is to find the comma and the verb that closes each half BEFORE trying to understand the whole, not reading left to right hoping it resolves itself.
Why it catches you out. English deliberately breaks long sentences up, and its style guides push you towards short ones, so a three-clause German sentence looks like bad writing when it is in fact ordinary. Two habits to unlearn at once: the length is fine, and the verbs all wait for the end.