About This Book

137 deutsche Praepositionen is a book of the German prepositions — all of them: the cover’s arithmetic is the concept. Prepositions form one of the few closed sets in German: nouns are born daily, but the prepositions are a fixed regiment, and a book can therefore do for them what no book can do for vocabulary — be complete. One hundred and thirty-seven words, each governing its case, each keeping its phrases, the whole territory surveyable end to end.

They deserve the monograph. Prepositions are where German stops behaving like a code for English: they translate by situation, not by word, and they command the cases — dative, accusative, genitive — with a landlord’s authority, so that every error is doubled, the wrong preposition dragging the wrong ending behind it. A learner’s fluency is judged, unfairly but truly, in these small words; natives forgive a missing noun and hear the wrong preposition like a cracked bell. Hence this book: the regiment, assembled for inspection.

What Learners Will Practise

The Cases They Command

Every preposition arrives with its government, and learners practise the marriages: which take the dative, which the accusative, which — the infamous two-way regiment — decide by whether the sentence stands still or moves. The practice converts case from an abstract table into a set of loyalties: the ending is no longer chosen, it is owed, and the sentence’s grammar settles the moment the preposition speaks. Drilled in phrases rather than isolation, the loyalties become reflexes, which is the only form in which grammar survives conversation.

Meaning by Situation, Not by Word

Learners practise the prepositions’ treachery directly: the same small word meaning at, on, to or by as context requires, and German’s choices splitting where English keeps one. The method is the context — phrases, verbs, fixed expressions — since a preposition memorised as a translation is a trap armed, while a preposition memorised in its company is a tool. One hundred and thirty-seven tools, each with its proper grip, is a workshop a learner can actually finish assembling.

The Fixed Phrases They Live In

Finally the book’s population is practised where it truly lives: inside the verb combinations and set phrases that German builds around its prepositions and that no grammar rule predicts. Learners meet the regiment on duty — waiting on, consisting of, depending on, each verb keeping its appointed small word like an assigned seat — and discover that much of ‘advanced German’ is simply these allegiances, learned pair by pair until the pairs outnumber the exceptions feared.

Key Features

Completeness is the feature: 137, the whole closed set, where vocabulary books can only sample. The specialisation is the second — a whole book for the words other grammars despatch in a chapter — and the counting the third: what can be numbered can be finished. In this collection it stands with the grammar references as the shelf’s precision instrument, the monograph of the small and mighty.

Who This Book Is For

Intermediate learners are its natural readers — far enough in to be ambushed daily by their errors in this territory — joined by advanced learners whose prepositions still betray them and examination candidates whose marks leak here first. Teachers form its second readership, arsenals being their professional need, and translators its third, for whom a complete roll-call is a complete reference.

How to Use This Book

Take the regiment in companies, not all at once: a group of prepositions with their cases and phrases, practised in sentences of your own making until the loyalties hold under speed. Keep it afterwards as the reference it is designed to be — the disputed preposition settled by lookup, not by hope. Its promise is finite and therefore keepable: when the last of the 137 stands correct in your own sentences without summons, this small, dense acre of German is yours, permanently garrisoned.

Related Books

Words counted by importance rather than by regiment are ranked in the German English Frequency Dictionary – Essential Vocabulary 2500 Most Used Words 783 Most Common Verbs, and the grammar these small words govern is grounded in Duden Grundwissen Grammatik Fit für den Bachelor.