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- Topic: German >
- "Das Mädchen hört den Hund."
23 Comments
Wouldn't another correct answer be "The girl listens to the dog"? As hören means both listen or hear in English depending on the context.
I would rather use "zuhören" as "listen". "Das Mädchen hört den Hund zu" would be "The girl listens to the dog":
That's right. In this context, "hören" does not mean "to listen".
Small correction: Das Mädchen hört dem Hund zu.
Thank you both!
Pons has let me down then, as it said "jdn/etwas hören" = to listen to sb/sth.
It's fine in a very limited number of contexts:
Ich höre Mozart = I'm listening to Mozart
Ich höre Radio = I'm listening to the radio
Ich höre Musik = I'm listening to music
Right. Off hand, I'd say this applies to audio recordings, broadcasts, and lectures.
Ok thanks again! So would you say "hören" means listen with things that one would logically listen to, like music?
Some verbs have a separable prefix which goes at the end when the verb is conjugated.
English has something similar: I pick the shirt up. - The verb here is "to pick up" not "to pick".
If you have trouble remembering hört, just remember it as, "Horten hears a who." ;)
I am not a native German speaker but have lived in Germany for several years. Can a native German speaker explain to me why the Article here is "den" when it is only 1 dog. Shouldn't it be "dem Hund" or "den Hunde"?
"hören" takes the accusative case. The accusative of "der Hund" is "den Hund".
So is it safe to say "hoeren" always takes the accusative case every time?
Yes, "hören" (to hear) always takes the accusative case and "zuhören" (to listen to) always takes the dative case.
Ok great, thanks for the clarification. Like you have stated above, since "zuhoeren" was always dative I had always had thought "hoeren" fell in the same category. Thanks for the knowledge.
So at the top when you corrected the statement to be "Das Mädchen hört dem Hund zu" it is dem not den because that uses zuhören instead of hören?
That's right. zuhören "to listen" takes the dative case (e.g. dem Hund) and hören "to hear" the accusative case (e.g. den Hund).
A bit like how in English we say "I hear you" but "I listen TO you" (not: "I listen you").
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Does anybody else hear an "S" sound between "hört" and "den"? It almost made me write the wrong conjugation.
It's just an overemphasised 't'. Normally it would "merge" with the following 'd', like in English, but the voice synthesiser cannot reproduce these contextual pronunciations. I don't think it can be fixed.
Yes I do. It is really disturbing, I can´t even recognize the word "hört" because of that sound plus that I hear some sort of m-sound, too.
