Prepositions Can Really Hang You Up the Most

Trying to brush up on my German, I'm wondering if maybe it's easier to teach an old dog new tricks than it is to reteach a Hund an old language. Nouns, actually, aren't so bad. The objects or concepts they represent are pretty congruent across the board and it's mostly just a matter of memorization: a dog is a Hund is a perro is a chien. Other languages may have those (to me) unfathomable and arbitrary genders but, again, you just put your head down and memorize what uses el or la or der, die or das.

Similarly, verbs, for the most part, translate on a one-to-one basis. With German and English, we even get to take advantage of our shared roots on some of the action words: singen and bringen and trinken (to sing, to bring, to drink). And even some (but by no means all) of the colloquial phrases are similar: to ask a friend "Wie gehts?" is basically asking "How goes it?"

Prepositions, though. That's where I struggle. I read once of a study where researchers would show people a spectrum of light and ask them to draw a line where thought "yellow" or "blue" or "purple" was. Everyone was in the same ballpark, of course, but people from the same culture were usually right together with their choices.

That's kind of how I feel about prepositions. I know it's just a matter of memorizing, but I feel like I don't know the secret handshake. Sometimes you use the word you think you would and sometimes the usage requires something different. For example, "to" and zu are often interchangeable, as are "after" and nach, but if you tell someone, "We're travelling to Munich," you say "Wir fahren nach München." I'll leave it to another post to discuss whether this concept of going after something translates to a cultural aggresiveness, but it does get confusing for us accidental tourists.

And then there are the words that really deceive you. You might think that an and auf would correspond to "on" and "off", and in many cases you'd be right. But sometimes they mean the opposite of what you think: to put "the book on the table" is to put "das Buch auf dem Tisch."

You also have to worry about the dative case (which we don't distinguish in English) and that adds another layer of complexity. For example, if you're using the preposition vor (generally meaning "before"), your articles may change depending on whether you mean something is "before" in time or "before" in placement.

If it sounds like I'm griping, I don't mean to be. I actually enjoy learning new languages, but I'm just wondering if I'm getting a little too old. On the other hand:

Patience and perseverance
Made a bishop of his Reverence

Which sounds a lot better than "Beharrlichkeit macht frei", don't you think?