Answers
May 30, 2013 - 04:11 AM
In German normally "sein" means the English "be" and "werden" the English "will" (Future Tenses) or "become". In the way of the second use of "werden" you could differ between "sein" as describing a condition/state/situation and "werden" describing an action. "Ich war dort" describes a condition/state/situation in the past, but I was born describes more or less that your birth was an action. If you look at the two sentences in case of the light: "Das Licht war beschädigt." describes the condition/state/situation in the past, that the light was damaged, but "Das Licht wurde ersetzt." means more or less an action in the past. You could say "Das Licht wurde beschädigt." and then you'd mean the action of damaging the light in the past and not the condition/state/situation as in "Das Licht war beschädigt".
May 30, 2013 - 10:50 AM
Very precise explanation. Thank you
May 30, 2013 - 12:03 PM
You're welcome :)
Jul 28, 2013 - 07:42 AM
Hi Toni!
We're not explaining "werden" in the Fluenz program yet, because it's a very advanced concept called passive vs. active voice.
Ich war dort = I was there (I was 'actively' there)
Ich wurde geboren " I was born (I was given birth to)
To me (a native German), the difference is not hazy at all, but since you use "To be" in English both in the passive and active voice, it's quite hard to grasp and considered an advanced grammatical concept.
In the tutorials you'll find we often give the literal "awkward" translation, and then we point out what it compares to in English.
By doing so, we attempt to create that bridge between the two. But you've touched upon a common point of discussion amongst the FluenzLab team, how much "awkward" English to use or not. When we put together fully literally translated sentences often they are very weird in English and in many cases we found that the sentences ended up loosing meaning for English speakers, and in fact causing more confusion.
We are always open for feedback, so thank you. We are certainly going to take this into account.
We're not explaining "werden" in the Fluenz program yet, because it's a very advanced concept called passive vs. active voice.
Ich war dort = I was there (I was 'actively' there)
Ich wurde geboren " I was born (I was given birth to)
To me (a native German), the difference is not hazy at all, but since you use "To be" in English both in the passive and active voice, it's quite hard to grasp and considered an advanced grammatical concept.
In the tutorials you'll find we often give the literal "awkward" translation, and then we point out what it compares to in English.
By doing so, we attempt to create that bridge between the two. But you've touched upon a common point of discussion amongst the FluenzLab team, how much "awkward" English to use or not. When we put together fully literally translated sentences often they are very weird in English and in many cases we found that the sentences ended up loosing meaning for English speakers, and in fact causing more confusion.
We are always open for feedback, so thank you. We are certainly going to take this into account.