"What happens on a normal day?"
Translation:Was passiert an einem normalen Tag?
13 Comments
27
Prepositions are pretty much always idiomatic and the idiomatic preposition for days in German is ‘an’, so ‘auf einem’ isn't correct.
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That would be “on the normal day” (“am” is the contracted form of “an dem” = “on the”).
Does mixed inflection like in normalen always take "en" at the end of the word?
I don't like the terms "strong/weak/mixed inflection", because they just lead to creating three categories each with some combination of rules and exceptions. Adjectives in mixed inflection do not always end in -en.
I find it better to understand the logic behind the endings. That way I can tell you something like "einem already shows the gender/case signal, but it's a modified signal, so the adjective ending must be -en". Such reasoning is mentally quicker to look up than the combination of tables from the "strong/weak/mixed" way of looking at things.
Any time you change the article (in this case the dative requires changing from der Tag to dem Tag), the adjective changes to an -en ending. In plural, it always ends with an -en no matter what.
"on a day" is metaphorically considered a location, so an takes the dative case.
