lethargic_man | Mushroom soup

Going out on a limb (*gulp*):

Heute habe ich die Pilzsuppe gemacht, dass

aviva_m traurich an(?) Pessach vermisst hat. Jetzt muss ich nur nicht die essen, bis sie kommt!

Corrections welcome. (I should possibly ~~embarrass myself~~ do this more.)

And, because I don't want to alienate half my already small readership:

Today I made the cream of mushroom soup that

aviva_m sadly missed at Pesach. Now all I have to do is not eat it until she comes!

Crossposts: http://lethargic-man.livejournal.com/381237.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

liv

Is the "time, manner, place" rule still extant in German? Because your second clause violates it.

Muss nicht means don't have to, it's a really annoying false friend. You want a should or a may there, I think.

I'm pretty certain you can't use bis like that, but I'm not sure how it does work with a verb.

From:

green_knight

Time, manner, place is definitely still in existence. (I'm currently copy editing textbook and discovering all kinds of things about German that I never knew.)

Ich muss ... nicht tun is a possible construction, but German usually choses a verb with a negative meaning instead of the negated verb, eg 'ich muss ... lassen' .

'bis' is ok.

From:

lethargic_man

Is the "time, manner, place" rule still extant in German? Because your second clause violates it.

That what rule? I don't think I know this one yet, or at any rate I'm not recognising it.

From:

green_knight

'time manner place' refers to the order of adverbs, and this is at least still _taught_ (see 'textbook I am currently editing'), although, if I look at

Abends esse ich gerne Suppe in meiner Wohnung.

I have to say that the rule looks like so much nonsense to me:

Abends esse ich gerne Suppe in meiner Wohnung. (and during the day, I prefer to eat something else)
In meiner Wohnung esse ich abends gerne Suppe. (and something else during the day - but when I'm elsewhere, preferences change)
Suppe esse ich gern abends in meiner Wohnung. (my preferred time and place to eat soup, I'm not keen on it elsewhere/when)

etc etc.

All in all, German is rather nonchalant about word order.

From:

lethargic_man

Fifteen months of formal German tuition later, I've finally been taught this rule; even my teacher told me it was advanced German.

From:

green_knight

die Suppe... die (not 'dass')

'an Pessach' is correct, as far as I can tell.

'traurig' (note spelling) is an adjective. Here it gets a bit difficult. Did aviva_m miss the soup (did not manage to get any) or did she miss it (wished there had been some)? 'vermissen' works only in the second context; the first one might be 'verpasst' (when it's accidental, like a train). 'leider' would be a better choice with 'verpasst' than 'traurigerweise' (which is possible, but not overly idiomatic). If you go for 'vermisst' there's a certain amount of sadness inherent, so I'd forego trying to translate the 'sadly'.

And in another quirk of the German language, while it's possible to say

'Jetzt muss ich nur die Suppe nicht essen' you would choose a positive action (protect the soup, leave it alone, ensure there is some left) over the negative not-eating, or if you must be negative, you'd use a construction with 'lassen' - Jetzt muss ich es nur lassen, die Suppe zu essen, bis aviva_m kommt.'

(And no, not embarassing at all.)

From:

lethargic_man

Thanks for your help.

'traurig' (note spelling) is an adjective.

I was under the impression there's no effective difference between adjectives and adverbs in German. What am I missing?

(And no, not embarassing at all.)

Apart from the fact I made several paragraphs' worth of mistakes in just two sentences, and that's after I'd been ~~learning~~ teaching myself for almost a year and a half!

From:

liv

I think you're missing the point! Learning a language is not about attaining perfection and correctly applying all the rules, learning a language is about being able to communicate increasingly sophisticated ideas. If you'd been learning a programming language for a year and a half, yeah, it would be embarrassing if two lines of code contained multiple errors. But natural languages don't work like that.

From:

green_knight

The adverb adjective thing is a funny one. In German, anything that's an adjective is referred to as an 'adjective' even when it functions as an adverb (then you just declare it to be adverbial. In English, it doesn't matter what it looks like (hard, fast): if it functions as an adverb, it's an 'adverb'.

'traurig' is a pure adjective: you can be traurig/sad, but you can't do something in a sad manner (and strictly speaking, 'sadly' isn't an adverb in your sentence anyway, as far as I understand it.)
(This is something that you'll only learn by reading and listening to a lot of German, but in this respect, German is quite limited - you can only describe people, stories in the wider sense, or anthropomorphised items as 'traurig' - everything else has to be sad-looking - I'd be happy with 'a sad fence' but not 'ein trauriger Zaun' - if it ain't crying, it ain't 'traurig'. In general, German objects have a very limited range in respect to the things they can do or be. It's one of the things that lends so much interestingness to the English language: there's no limit to what inanimate objects can do. )

(This comes out of my feel for the language, so I don't know how textbooks will describe this - I haven't gotten this far yet) Instead of modifying the verb with an adverb, quite often German will modify the subject with an adjective:

Ich gehe fröhlich die Straße entlang is not, to my ear a 'I walk happily' but rather a 'in a happy mood, I
walk'. (As both forms look identical, that's probably not something often touched upon).

Confused yet?

(And, really, don't worry about the mistakes - that's how you learn. German is awkward enough to be a challenge to anyone - working on the textbook I realise just how many things there are *to* learn.)

From:

curious_reader

I disagree with "muss nicht". You mean "darf nicht". I know it is in English "musn't" but cannot be translated the same way. I made that mistake when I translated from German to English in school. It is wrong!!!

I don't know how to put the creme in it however.

I would translate it as you want to say it.

"Heute habe ich die Pilzsuppe gemacht, die aviva_m traurigerweise zu Pesach vermisst hat. Jetzt darf ich nicht die Suppe essen, bis sie kommt."
I think that is correct. My German is a bit rusty. I cannot translate from your English very well.

I forgot the e in "essen". I look like an idiot now. I hope I have everything as I wanted it.

From:

green_knight

It's perfectly acceptable to use 'muss# in the sense of (now I must) (not eat the soup/refrain from eating the soup) and I think that the compulsion is very suitable for the sentence here.

If you want to use 'darf' the easiest thing would be to say "Jetzt darf ich keine Suppe essen".

It would be even easier to make more soup :-)

From:

lethargic_man

German: A language in which it is easier to make more soup than to work out how to say one shouldn't eat the soup one has already made.

[Cover of bilingual edition of 'The Awful German Language' by Mark Twain]

PS: You two do know each other is German, don't you?

From:

green_knight

German: A language in which it is easier to make more soup than to work out how to say one shouldn't eat the soup one has already made.

I *so* want to borrow that - with full attribution, of course - for my website.