Terminology

Unfortunately the terminology can be somewhat difficult here, not because the concepts themselves are difficult, but because the terminology itself difficult to work with. For English speakers, or at least English speaking grammarians, words that modify other words are either adjectives or adverbs. If the word modifies a noun then it is an adjective, and if the word modifies something else, which can be any other kind of word or phrase, or even the rest of the sentence, then it's an adverb. This classification corresponds to the conditions where the suffix "-ly" is normally used in English, but there is no such suffix in German so this criterion is less useful here. The term modifier can be applied to adverbs and some adjectives (depending on how they're used), and also includes phrases that perform a similar function. Meanwhile German speaking grammarians tend to organize these words along more logical lines, and, of course, differently than English speaking grammarians. But there is less agreement amongst themselves as to the exact scheme. For example Duden (widely regarded as an authority on German grammar, calls *nicht* (to be covered below) a *Partikel* but DWDS (a widely regarded online German dictionary) lists it as an *Adverb*.

Another potential cause of confusion is that German words are often more flexible that their English counterparts, so the role a word plays depends on which meaning is attached to it in a particular sentence. And so the same term does not always apply to the same word in all its possible meanings.

The upshot is that there is no generally agreed upon name for the concept that is the subject of this section, namely that of a word that modifies a verb. The German meaning of *Adverb* comes close, but again, the exact meaning of the German term is variable. The German term *Umstandswort*, literally "circumstance word", is more descriptive, but it is a mouthful. So, for simplicity, the term adverb, with no modifier, will be used here for the concept and we'll use the term adverb with some modifier for words that modify other types of word. For example, in the sentence "He's sleeping soundly," the word "soundly" is an adverb because it's applied to the verb "to sleep". In German, the entire sentence (or clause in more complex sentences) tends to revolve around the verb, so an adverb may usually be regarded as being applied the sentence as a whole. There are a few adverbs which usually only apply to an entire sentence and we'll cover those later in the section.

Adverb classification

German adverbs are not inflected, so you don't have to worry about things like number and gender with them. Some grammars thus include them in a larger class of "uninflected words" ― Nichtflektierbaren Wörter. We can classify them according to the type of information they provide:

• Adverbs of time tell you when the action is taking place.
  • nun ― "now"
  • heute ― "today"
  • gestern ― "yesterday"
  • morgen ― "tomorrow"
• Adverbs of location tell you where the action is taking place
  • hier ― "here"
  • dort ― "there"
  • draußen ― "outside"
  • drinnen ― "inside"
• Adverbs of direction tell you in which direction movement is taking place
  • her ― "(to) here"
  • hin ― "(to) there"
  • weg ― "away"
• Adverbs of manner
  • anders ― "differently"
  • gern ― "with pleasure"
• Other adverbs
  • auch ― "also"
  • nur ― "just, only"

The V2 word order

Before adding these new words to sentences, we need to explore how the words will be arranged. English is said to have SVO word order, which means the the subject (S) comes before the verb (V), which is then sometimes followed but other nouns or objects (O). German has what is called V2 word order, meaning that the subject and other elements of the sentence can go in various places, but the verb (V) must be in the second position. (At least in the simple sentence types we're covering at the moment.) This can sound odd to English speaking ears, but it becomes more natural with practice. To see how this works, we'll compare German and English versions of a simple subject+verb+adverb sentence.

In English, usual order of words in such a sentence is (subject) then (verb) then (adverb), for example:

• "I'm working now." (In this case the verb has two parts "am working".)

If you want to accent the "now", then you can move it to the start of the sentence:

• "Now I'm working."

But notice that the subject "I" comes before the verb "am working" in both cases.

In German, you can say the same thing as:

• Ich arbeite nun.

If you want to accent the nun then you can move it to the front, but with V2 word order the verb must come second and the subject must be moved after the verb:

• Nun arbeite ich.

Note that the word for word translation would be "Now work I," which is incorrect in English. But the word for word translation of the English into German, Nun ich arbeite, is just as incorrect. Much of the time, in both English and German, the subject will go first and the word order winds up about the same in both languages. But flexible word order is essential to convey the stress and importance you're giving to the individual parts of the sentence, and since the rules for possible word orders in German are different than they are in English, you must master these differences to produce grammatical German.

Negation of verbs

There are a number of ways to negate a sentence in German, and when to use which one depends on the situation. One of the most important is to use the adverb nicht, which tells you that whatever the verb is saying, that's what you're not doing. For example:

• Wir reden nicht. ― "We don't talk."
• Ich arbeite nicht. ― "I'm not working."
• Sie kocht nicht. ― "She doesn't cook."

The German grammar is actually much simpler in this case since English requires an additional verb ("to do", "to be") to accomplish this. This is good news, but be sure not try to use the word for word translation from English to German since the result will always be ungrammatical. When nicht is used as an adverb it comes last in the sentence, except in cases where the something else must come last and has priority. (As noted above, Duden does not consider nicht an adverb, and this is the main reason. Duden includes the ability to move the the front of a sentence as a criterion for being an adverb.) But note that there are other uses of nicht, and its position in the sentence is a clue you can use to figure out exactly which word is being negated.

A similar adverb is nie ("never"). It can be used similarly to the way nicht is used, except that it's more flexible in terms of word order.

• Sie kocht nie. ― "She never cooks."
• Nie kocht sie. ― "Never does she cook."

Sentence adverbs

As mentioned above, there is a small class of words that serve to modify the rest of the sentence. They tell you what the speaker thinks of the fact itself rather than describing the action. For example:

• natürlich ― "naturally, of course"
• leider ― "unfortunately"
• vielleicht ― "perhaps"