Quote:
Originally Posted by OctobersBlackRose
So the verb is always in second place, but the next lesson was about putting the verb at the end, it didn't really explain much, the example sentence was, "Wir gehen nicht einkaufen, well wir kein Geld haben". And the verb gehen is in second place but the second part of the sentence beginning with "well" the verb is at the end, but it wasn't explained very well at all. I guess it happens with dependent clauses. It did give examples of what they called subordinating conjunctions, words like dass, well (because), damit, obwohl, bevor, and wenn (which they're translating to "when" but everytime I look it up it translates to "if"). And it says that they always end with the verb. I'm so confused on what this all means, it like they teach you one thing that seems concrete then its like no hers another way to do this or as in verb endings saying verbs end in -en then you see some ending in just -e or -st with no further explanation as to why that is. Verbs are confusing period.
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Oookay, I actually think I should shut up now, because that's going to turn into an unpleasant competition with your book - unpleasant for you, because we're going to contradict each other, trying to go at our own paces. But yeah, as I said in my previous post, there are nuances, among them dependent clauses which completely flip the word order around... And to be honest, based on my experience, I wouldn't worry about it too much if I were you. It took me ages to get the various word orders... I mean, I'm still getting it... Maybe you'll do better, but I haven't found a very simple rule to all that. Some conjunctions flip it, some don't, and also they change the way verbs are conjugated.
All in all, the book probably did its best. And yeah, you said it... Well, not just verbs, a lot of it is confusing, like a language with a many-thousand year history should be.