German Questions

[Expugnator]

The distinction seems sharper in Norwegian (gå for walking only, reise for most of all), as for German it seems rather shaky...perhaps there is a raising trend of just using 'gehen' for everything the English way? What about using 'reisen' as a more neutral form/a wildcard?

[jeff_lindqvist]

I know that words in closely related languages don't always match perfectly. Maybe reise (Norwegian) and reisen (German) do - I'm not sure. Swedish has gå (walk), fara (slightly local and/or outdated - I never use it), resa (more or less only associated with long-distance trips; e.g. resebyrå - travel agency, reseledare - tour leader), and the general åka (implying a vehicle on dry land, at sea or in the air).

[Serpent]

I agree that it might be external influence in German. Maybe Romance too?

In Russian it's also very strict with идти, ходить being only on foot and usually short in time and distance.

[Bao]

Noooo, reisen absolutely doesn't work that way!
I can't really explain it, but I think gehen/fahren - strong verbs - emphasize the fact that you move from one place to a different one, while reisen - a weak verb - 'just' means travelling long distances. It's more formal and much less versatile. Possibly more poetic too.

I don't know about whether it might be due to external influence, that is, rather than looking at other languages I might think that maybe newly developed transportation modes might have something to do with it. And, both verbs are strong verbs, so I would think their usage has always been relatively common (when words become uncommon we tend to forget the irregular forms and replace them with regular ones), so the transition should've been gradually.

Would be interesting to see when the constructions 'infinitive gehen' like in 'ich gehe essen' (and 'kommst du essen?') and the usage of gehen to mean to move or emigrate to a place have emerged.


Using fliegen is not obligatory per se, but for some odd reason, it's treated as if the flying bit was crucial information, and many people will ask back if it's a distance you'd usually take a plane for- depending on the person and context as if they're puzzled you withheld that bit of information, if you're trying to say you absolutely did not fly, or they will make fun of you.

[LMAshton]

Next question:

Er war wütend. Er ist wütend gewesen. Both are interpreted as "He was angry."

What's the difference?

[Bao]

Nice one.

So. Preterite/imperfect and present perfect. We don't have such a nice distinction between those tenses as English speakers have.

In written German, preterite is for things that happened in the past, while present perfect is for things that are mentioned to set the stage for something that happens in the present. Kind of, in theory.

In spoken German the distribution of preterite and present perfect tenses mostly depends on your age and where you come from. People from the south tend to use present perfect most of the time when referring to the past, and I think it's spreading north, too - the tenses are easier to form because you only need to remember the participle and the conjugated forms of the auxiliary verbs. I also think older, especially elderly educated people use more preterite in normal speech than other groups; when I use as many as my grandma does I sound very pretentious.
And then there are some common verbs which often are used in both forms, like sein with a complement, and for which some speakers do make a distinction between those two forms.

In my case, I think if I say "er war wütend" comes across as stronger, like something I witnessed myself, while "er ist wütend gewesen" might also be something I had been told about afterwards?

[LanguageSponge]

Bao has already answered the question about the distinction between the present perfect and the imperfect tenses, however she is a native speaker so I'd like to weigh in a bit with a different perspective as someone who half grew up with it and half learnt it in school.

The first thing to say is that even though English and German are related, these two tenses don't mirror their English equivalents at all. In fact, you may as well buy a new mirror, the rules are completely different.

The rule of thumb for spoken German is that you use the present perfect tense: Ich habe gestern ein neues Auto gekauft. This is a very common rule that learners seem to be told when they're learning in school, or at least the kids in my classes always were, as were my friends in other schools both in England and elsewhere in Europe. I should mention now by the way that this rule was explained by native speakers who hailed from vastly different regions of Germany or in one case Austria, they were of different ages and it turned out as I got to know them all better that they had quite different social backgrounds too. If you use the perfect tense for past actions as a rule when you're speaking, you will never go far wrong. You won't cause misunderstandings and you won't sound weird.

Using the perfect tense like this may take some getting used to, but it's logical if you think a bit about the reasons why, as Bao did: The perfect tense is much, much more regular than the imperfect tense. You don't have to think half as hard; people are naturally going to take shortcuts eventually and this is one of them in German.

However there are some very common verbs which break even this 'perfect tense in speech' rule: haben (have), sein (be), können (be able to, can), dürfen (be allowed to), sollen (should), wollen (want)... I think I have them all.

These ones are very commonly used in the imperfect even in speech. I can't remember the last time I heard wollen, können, sollen or dürfen said in the perfect tense and I'd probably be slightly taken-aback if I did.

In writing the game changes again, but I think this is much simpler to explain. In writing, the deciding factor of which tense you use depends on your audience: who you're writing to. If you're writing to a friend, family, on the forum here - basically any kind of informal setting - keep to the same rules as for tenses in speech above. Including those verbs I said were exceptions.

In formal writing like news reports, sciency stuff, law, medicine, even story writing for anything but the youngest of children, we use the imperfect tense. It sounds... a lot more detached and emotionally neutral. This goes with Bao's little anecdote about her grandmother: Her grandmother apparently uses the imperfect more in speech, which is a characteristic of older speakers of German - this sense of detachment associated with the imperfect tense explains why Bao said she herself would sound pretentious if she used it.

The imperfect tense is undeniably more difficult to use, there are a lot of irregular verbs in the imperfect. A lot of younger natives are even forgetting how to form the imperfect tense in my experience, which is why this tendency towards the perfect tense in speech is happening even further up north in Germany.

So, rules of thumb:

In speech, use the present perfect for 99% of verbs and use the imperfect for haben, sein, sollen, wollen, dürfen and können.

In writing, use the perfect tense for informal writing and the imperfect for story writing and more formal settings.

[Bao]

What he said! I knew there were a couple of verbs we do use in imperfect, but I couldn't have told you which ones - where I grew up it's actually common to use all verbs in present perfect, even the modals and sein/haben. (Plus, they have some more adventurous constructions called double perfect and double past perfect ... which I may use sometimes, cough)

And there are actually verbs where the irregular past participle still exists but many people switch to using a regular imperfect form in writing.

[Via Diva]

It all really depends on a speaker. I was lucky to talk to a few Germans who even warned me that their German was "weird", and I remember discussing Präteritum with one of them, and the conclusion was that it's rather sad to see everybody switching to Perfekt. We've established that these lyrics are a perfect example of how people don't really speak anymore:
So geschah es, daß ein Lord,
weit von den eig'nen Hallen fort,
sich verirrte an diesen Ort...-
ihn rief Lazemare.


Honestly, I notice this tendency to feel sad about features that die out or are already dead rather often - be it Russian, English or German. For example, another thing in German that sounds crazy to me is that Genitiv is slowly being replaced by Dativ everywhere, with lots of phrases being out of use already.

[Josquin]

Oh, we're having that discussion again. How interesting!

Here's a thread from HTLAL where I had a longer discussion with some gentleman about the above topic: Learning preterite forms in German

Where I come from, we use the preterite in spoken speech quite frequently. But on the other hand, it's a rural region which might be somewhat conservative in its habits of speech.

Concerning the whole "gehen"/"fahren" discussion: "Fahren" is quite a neutral term for travelling in general, while "gehen" specifies walking and "fliegen" specifies going by airplane. "Ich gehe nach München", however, means "I'm moving to Munich". There's no influence whatsoever from English or Norwegian or whatever implied. As has already been mentioned, "reisen" is upper register and corresponds to the English verb "to travel".