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- "From the outside?"
"From the outside?"
Translation:Von außen?
14 Comments
Basically außen means “on the outside, on the outer surface”, whereas draußen means “not within”. Confer here for more details.
I’m afraid not. For one thing you’d need an article: von der Außenseite. More importantly however, Außenseite quite literally means the outer side of something in German. For example if we’re talking about a window, its Außenseite would be the outer glass pane. It is not used to refer to the general area “outside” – that would be außen or draußen (or as a preposition “outside the window”: außerhalb).
Btw, a small clarification in case my original correction to PhilipMars9 generated confusion: I did not mean that you can’t combine the adverb außen with a preposition like von; in fact you can. What I was trying to say was that an adverb like außen cannot take an article because only nouns take those.