6.7 Places and prepositions

Places which take "an"

You will already have noted that when you say that you are "at" several types of location in German, you use the preposition "an" - i.e. "am Bahnhof", "an der Ampel" etc.

 

If a German location uses "an" to translate "at", then you should use "zu" to describe movement towards such a place, and "von" to describe movement away from it. Thus when describing a bus stop you would say:

 

die Bushaltestelle = the bus-stop

an der Bushaltestelle = at the bus-stop

zur Bushaltestelle = to the bus-stop

von der Bushaltestelle = from the bus-stop

The following table explains this pattern for some more of the nouns which we have met so far.

Neuter countries

We can construct a similar pattern for countries, but only those which are neuter. Here of course different prepositions are used and no definite articles. Note that all three prepositions "in", "nach" and "aus" take the dative case:

 

Deutschland = Germany

in Deutschland = in Germany

nach Deutschland = to Germany

aus Deutschland = from Germany