44 Comments
Thanks. That made me look at dict.cc (German English Online Dictionary) a bit more.
das Haus (noun) = House (We live in that blue house over there.)
das Zuhause (noun) = Home (Your home is warm and cozy.)
* Hause (as a noun) = * I can't find this word without 'zu', 'nach', or 'im' before it. But, any reference I find all relates to "home". I didn't find a gender for Hause, either. So, I don't believe this is a stand-alone German noun at all, just part of the adverbs 'zu Hause', 'nach Hause', 'im Hause'.
zu Hause / zuhouse (adverb) = home , at home
nach Hause / nachhause (adverb) = home , at home
im Hause (adverb) = indoors, about the house, on premises.
zu (proposition/dative) = to, too, at ['at' seems to be only applied when used with "home"]
nach (preposition/dative) = toward, to, on
To help answer fatuscat, "Why is the "zu" necessary?"
A: If I'm not mistaken, 'zu' is necessary because it is part of the adverb "zuhouse" or "zu House" (they are the same adverb to mean, 'home' or 'at home'). Since 'Hause' doesn't appear to be an actual German noun, it wouldn't make any sense to remove 'zu' from the adverb, 'zu Hause'/'zuhause'.
It seems that by breaking up the adverb "zuhause" into "zu Hause" (still an adverb) and capitalizing the "Hause" it kind of makes a pseudo preposition/noun.
Just don't look at "zu Hause" as two separate words or "Hause" as a noun....look at it as "zuhause". Same goes for "nach Hause" and "im Hause".
Hause is the old dative case form of Haus, with the old dative case ending -e.
The old form survived in the fixed expressions zu Hause, nach Hause; sometimes im Hause in formal contexts.
Normally, though, we'd say im Haus.
It's a colloquial expression. Usually you see 'zu' as meaning 'to', but with 'home', it's a notable exception meaning 'at'. You wouldn't say, "Ich bin zur Universität".
No. This only works with "zu Hause" because of that particular idiom.
So, it is "zu Hause" only because it means "home". Otherwise, it would be "zu Haus", right?
In the singular dative, masc and neut nouns with only one syllable have an optional -e ending that is usually left off, except for a few expressions like "nach Hause" and "nach dem Tode".
34
I incorrectly wrote "I am coming from the house", but the computer accepted that wrong answer as correct, which, I believe, it should not have done. Is DuoLingo accepting incorrect answers because too many people are complaining that their wrong answer should be accepted?
"because too many people are complaining" would be my guess, possibly in connection with "the person who edited this sentence to accept those doesn't speak English and/or German very well".
I can't see who last edited that sentence. Possibly it was the Pearson editors.
The translation into German also accepts da Heim which should, I think, be daheim.
why "I am coming from house" is wrong ? and "I am coming from home" is correct ?
"I am coming from house" is incorrect in English, and requires an article. "zu Hause" means 'home' or 'at home', so it's the better translation here.
- 421
So, if I have understood this correctly, the three cases are:
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zu Hause : when being stationary at home
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nach Hause : when moving towards home
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von zu Hause : when moving away from home
i know it's dative because of von, but someone please explain why is it von and not aus
I think it is an old dative form of Haus that never lost its ending in this expression. See my comment above also.
Is there a difference between house and home in German like there is in English? Would it just be "zu Hause/Zuhause" as I've seen mentioned?
das Haus = the house, das Zuhause = the home, yes.
But "home" as an adverb as in "going home" is nach Hause, and "at home" is zu Hause -- both of those regardless of whether your home is a house or not. (It could be a flat/apartment, for example.)
"I come from home" is totally strange. In English we would use the Present Perfect tense "I've come from home" or "I've come from my place" (to quote a more vernacular expression.
- 398
This discussion so reminds me of the brilliant 'Romanes eunt domus' scene from The Life of Brian
Because that means something else -- that you are returning to your own home, rather than that you have left your own home and are just arriving at some other place.
- 211
Please.. How many meanings does ' von' have?... it is sometimes ' of' and others ' from' and what else? thanks..
Prepositions often have many meanings -- this is not limited to English or German.
As such, one preposition in one language will often translate to several prepositions in another language, but the "number of meanings" will probably be even larger than that, and difficult to count.
For example, perhaps von has 27 meanings; 13 of those correspond to 13 meanings of "of" and 5 of them to 5 meanings of "from", with the remaining 9 meanings corresponding to other expressions in English. (Just making up numbers to show that the number of translations is not really related to the number of meanings.)
