Le Baron wrote:tungemål wrote:In the quantitative case it means something like "of them" (He has three of them).
Indeed. Like French's Il en a trois. Er + telwoord. Heeft tungemål boeken thuis? Ja, hij heeft er zeker 800 (van).
Aha, so this one is really only a special case of the prepositional use - ervan but you leave out the van.
tungemål wrote:The grammatical er doesn't have any meaning; it's only a grammar requirement. In Norwegian we'd use "det" in this case, in English "there", or nothing.
Aside from the 'er', this sort of phrase really baffled me at the beginning. It's so common to say 'Er wordt gebeld' and the 'wordt' tripped me up because I read it just as 'becoming' when here it essentially just means 'is'. So only until I forced myself to see Er wordt gelachen as 'laughter is occurring', did it make sense to me.
Somehow I've never noticed anything unnatural with using wordt here - but the word does mean become, so it's not logical. Er wordt verwondert.
With the sentence: Wij sporen er de buurvrouw toe aan, I would look at these in the past and think 'how?!' The NT2 instructor encouraged us to rewrite such sentences to find the separable verbs and er + preposition, so I'd end up with: wij willen haar ertoe aansporen. Like term grouping in algebra!
Good tip - what confuses me is the position of er - it seems to want to be placed as early as possible in the sentence.
One other thing about 'er'. Sometimes, quite a bit actually, you hear people say daar where you'd expect er. So: Je hebt er drie van (ervan). Mag ik er eentje daarvan? (daarvan unseparated). Wat denk je d'rvan?. The common sentence: Hij is er niet often sounds like 'hij is d'r niet'. Somewhat like how French adds a 't' to stop a vowel clash.
Also especially if you want to add stress: Daar hou ik niet van