Tag 07 - Fragen stellen

Tag 07 von 60 - Satzmelodie, Ja/Nein-Fragen, die Verneinung mit nicht. Zwei Stunden.

---

Until now you have mostly been answering. Today you learn to ask, which is the single change that turns a German lesson into a German conversation - a person who can only answer runs out of things to say in ninety seconds, and a person who can ask keeps the other one talking while they catch up.

Two pieces of grammar do it. The first is almost unfairly simple: to turn a statement into a yes-no question, move the verb to the front. That is the whole rule. The second is negation with nicht, which is the other half of the kein you met on Tag 04 - and the only real question is where in the sentence it goes.

How to run this page

Top to bottom, every answer out loud before you type it, nothing saved. Today the out-loud part matters more than usual, because section 1 is about melody: a German yes-no question typed correctly but said with a falling tone is still going to be heard as a statement. If you only type today’s answers, you will learn half of the lesson.

1. Aufwärmen - zehn Stück aus Tag 06

Yesterday added nothing new, so this is the week itself, cold.

2. Aussprache - die Satzmelodie

Six days on individual sounds. Today the unit gets bigger: the shape of a whole sentence.

German intonation is flatter than English and it does most of its work at the very end of the sentence. There are only two patterns you need this week:

Satztyp	Melodie am Ende	Beispiel
Aussage	fällt	Ich wohne in Hamburg.
Ja/Nein-Frage	steigt	Wohnen Sie in Hamburg?
W-Frage	fällt	Wo wohnen Sie?

That third row surprises people. A question with a question word does not rise - it falls, exactly like a statement. The wo has already done the job of marking it as a question, so the voice does not need to. Only the yes-no question, which has no question word to give it away, has to signal itself with the rising tone.

Say each of these pairs aloud. Same words, different ending, different meaning:

Fällt am Ende	Steigt am Ende
Sie wohnen in Hamburg.	Wohnen Sie in Hamburg?
Sie kommen aus Deutschland.	Kommen Sie aus Deutschland?
Sie arbeiten hier.	Arbeiten Sie hier?
Er spricht Deutsch.	Spricht er Deutsch?

The habit English gives you

English lets you make a question out of a statement with tone alone - You live in Hamburg? - and English speakers carry that straight into German. German will not accept it in the same way: the verb really does have to move. Get the word order right first, then put the rising tone on top of it. Tone without word order sounds like a foreigner guessing; word order without tone sounds flat but is understood.

3. Neue Bausteine - zwölf Stück

Ja/Nein-Fragen: das Verb zuerst

On Tag 02 you learned the W-question. Its shape is fixed: question word first, verb second, subject third.

Position 1	Position 2	Rest
Wo	wohnen	Sie?
Woher	kommen	Sie?
Was	machen	Sie beruflich?
Wie	heißen	Sie?

A yes-no question is the same sentence with the question word deleted and the verb slid into the empty first slot:

Position 1	Position 2	Rest
Wohnen	Sie	hier?
Kommen	Sie	aus Deutschland?
Arbeiten	Sie	in Hamburg?
Haben	Sie	Zeit?

Compare the three shapes side by side, because this is the thing to burn in today:

Form	Beispiel	Verb steht
Aussage	Sie wohnen in Hamburg.	an zweiter Stelle
W-Frage	Wo wohnen Sie?	an zweiter Stelle
Ja/Nein-Frage	Wohnen Sie in Hamburg?	an erster Stelle

The Tag 05 rule that the verb comes second is not broken here - it is simply that the yes-no question is the one sentence type in German where the verb takes first position. Everything else on this page still obeys it.

Verneinung mit nicht

kein from Tag 04 negates a noun: Ich habe keine Zeit, Das ist kein Problem. It is the negative of ein, and it only ever appears in front of a noun.

nicht negates everything else - a verb, an adjective, an adverb, a place. The rule of thumb is short enough to memorise today:

kein or nicht

If the thing you are cancelling is a noun, use kein. For anything else, use nicht. That single test will be right almost every time at A1.

Where nicht sits depends on what it is cancelling:

Was wird verneint	Position von nicht	Beispiel
das ganze Verb	ganz am Ende	Ich arbeite nicht.
das ganze Verb	ganz am Ende	Er kommt heute nicht.
ein Adjektiv oder Adverb	direkt davor	Ich spreche nicht gut Deutsch.
ein Ort oder eine Herkunft	direkt davor	Er kommt nicht aus Berlin.
ein Nomen mit ein	gar nicht, nimm kein	Ich habe keine Zeit.

The pattern underneath those rows: nicht goes as late in the sentence as it can, except that it jumps in front of the one specific word it is cancelling. Ich spreche nicht gut Deutsch cancels the gut, not the speaking - you do speak German, just badly. That is the sentence you will need most often this month, so learn it as one piece.

Die zwölf Bausteine

Read each one aloud twice before you start the drill.

Deutsch	English	Wann
Kommen Sie aus Deutschland?	do you come from Germany	verb first, rising tone
Wohnen Sie hier?	do you live here	hier is the small word that makes it natural
Arbeiten Sie in Hamburg?	do you work in Hamburg
Nein, ich arbeite nicht	no, I do not work	nicht at the end
Ich spreche nicht gut Deutsch	I do not speak German well	nicht in front of gut
Sprechen Sie bitte langsam	please speak slowly	the most useful sentence today
Noch einmal, bitte	once more, please	when you missed it but nearly had it
Wie bitte?	sorry, what	when you missed it completely
Ich lerne seit zwei Monaten	I have been learning for two months	German uses the present tense here
Woher kommen Sie?	where do you come from	woher, not wo - it asks for origin
Wo wohnen Sie?	where do you live
Was machen Sie beruflich?	what do you do for a living	beruflich is what turns it into a job question

wo and woher

Wo wohnen Sie? asks where you are. Woher kommen Sie? asks where you came from. The -her on the end means motion towards the speaker, so woher is literally from where. Ask a German Wo kommen Sie? and they will understand you and quietly note that you are a beginner.

4. Drills

Substitutionsdrill

Replace the word in brackets and say the whole new sentence.

Konversionsdrill

The first five: turn the statement into a yes-no question. The last four: make the sentence negative, choosing nicht or kein correctly.

Antwortdrill

Answer as yourself, in a full sentence.

Übersetzungsdrill

5. Wiederholung

Three sources today, exactly as the schedule says: yesterday’s review day, Tag 05, and Tag 02 - the five-day-old material, which is the fragile one.

6. Text und Hören

Anna from yesterday, one week later, and this time you are the one asking. Every question in Ravi’s lines is from today.

Anna: Guten Tag, Ravi! Wie geht es Ihnen? Ravi: Danke, gut. Und Ihnen? Woher kommen Sie? Anna: Ich komme aus München. Und Sie? Ravi: Ich komme aus Indien. Wohnen Sie hier? Anna: Ja, genau. Ich wohne in Hamburg. Arbeiten Sie in Hamburg? Ravi: Nein, ich arbeite nicht. Ich studiere an der TUHH. Anna: Und was machen Sie beruflich? Ravi: Wie bitte? Sprechen Sie bitte langsam. Anna: Was machen Sie beruflich? Ravi: Ich mache einen MBA. Ich spreche nicht gut Deutsch. Anna: Sie sprechen gut! Lernen Sie lange Deutsch? Ravi: Ich lerne seit zwei Monaten.

Notice what happens in the middle: Ravi does not understand, says so in German, gets the question again, and the conversation continues. That exchange is not a breakdown - it is the most realistic thing on the page, and being able to run it is worth more than any single chunk.

Read it aloud twice, both parts, with the melody: rising on Anna’s and Ravi’s yes-no questions, falling on everything else. Then cover Ravi’s lines and produce them from Anna’s cues.

7. Bidirektional

Into German today. On Tag 09 you will translate these back the other way, so do them properly now, out loud, before you type.

8. Sprechen - zehn Minuten

Back to ten minutes after yesterday’s twenty. Today the job is reversed: you ask the questions and the AI answers. Stand up, and do not let it interview you.

Du bist eine Person in einem Café in Hamburg. Ich bin Anfänger (Tag 7, A1).
Heute übe ich Fragen, also stelle mir selbst fast keine - antworte nur kurz
auf meine Fragen und warte dann, bis ich die nächste stelle.

Sprich langsam, maximal sechs Wörter pro Satz, und nur mit diesen Wörtern:
Guten Tag, Hallo, Tschüss, Wie geht es Ihnen, Danke gut, Und Ihnen,
Ich heiße, Ich komme aus, Ich wohne in, Ich arbeite in, Ich lerne Deutsch,
Ich studiere, Ich mache einen MBA, Ja genau, Nein danke, Entschuldigung,
Ich verstehe nicht, Einen Kaffee bitte, Was kostet das, Das ist zu teuer,
Ich habe keine Zeit, nicht, kein.

Wenn ich zwei Minuten lang keine Frage stelle, sage nur: Haben Sie eine
Frage? Wenn ich einen Fehler in der Wortstellung mache, wiederhole meine
Frage einfach richtig, ohne Erklärung, und antworte dann darauf.
Fang jetzt an und begrüße mich.

The one thing to listen for

Your own melody. You will get the word order right on the page and then say Wohnen Sie hier? with a flat or falling tone, because that is what English intonation does to a sentence that already looks like a question. Record thirty seconds of this session on your phone and listen back to the ends of your questions. It is uncomfortable and it fixes the problem faster than anything else.

9. Auf Papier

Diktat. Set a ten-second loop on the shadowing audio and let it repeat. Write down any six German words by hand without pausing, then check and correct them in a second colour.

Satz des Tages. Write out by hand, from memory, the four questions you would ask a stranger in a Hamburg café:

1. Where they come from.

2. Where they live.

3. Whether they work in Hamburg.

4. What they do for a living.

Then write your own honest answer to each one underneath it. Eight lines in total. Check them against section 3 and mark every difference.

Fehlerliste. Fresh page, started yesterday. Every item the drills marked wrong today, written correctly, in German only. Pay particular attention to any sentence where you put nicht in the wrong place - copy the correct version twice, not once, because word order errors are motor habits and one repetition will not shift them.

Genus-Farben. One new noun today: der Monat, blue. Add it to the list.

Goldlist. Not today. Your twenty-five-item page from Tag 06 is sitting in the notebook with a date on it - leave it completely alone. The next Goldlist page is Tag 09, and the Tag 06 page gets distilled on Tag 20.

10. Woche 1 geschafft

Seven days. Here is exactly what is now in your head:

Tag	Thema	Neue Bausteine
01	Vokale, Begrüßung, sich vorstellen	12
02	Umlaute, das Verb sein, W-Fragen	12
03	Diphthonge, der/die/das, Nomen groß	12
04	haben, ein/eine, kein/keine, Zahlen bis 100	12
05	Präsens, Pronomen, Verb an zweiter Stelle	12
06	Wiederholungstag	0
07	Satzmelodie, Ja/Nein-Fragen, nicht	12
Summe		72

Seventy-two chunks, six verbs in the present tense, three genders, the numbers to a hundred, both ways of saying no, and enough questions to keep a stranger talking for five minutes. A week ago you had none of it.

What you can actually do now: walk into a café in Hamburg, greet someone correctly for the time of day, introduce yourself, say where you are from and what you are doing here, ask them the same four things back, order and pay for a coffee, and say - in German - that you did not understand and would they please slow down. That last one is not a consolation prize. It is the sentence that keeps a conversation in German instead of collapsing into English, and it is why it was taught in week one rather than week six.

One honest line about week two

It gets harder on Tag 08, and not gradually. Week one worked because every sentence you met had a fixed shape you could memorise whole. Week two brings the cases - accusative first, then dative - and cases are the point where German stops being learnable as a phrasebook. der Mann becomes den Mann depending on what he is doing in the sentence, and every article, and later every adjective, starts changing form. Nothing you learned this week becomes wrong, but a lot of it is about to grow endings.

Expect the drill scores to drop for about four days. That is the material, not you.

---

Woche 1 ist fertig. Zurück zur Übersicht - Tag 08 wird gebaut, nachdem diese erste Woche einmal wirklich durchgearbeitet wurde und klar ist, was zu langsam, zu schnell oder zu leicht war.