How German Negation works

Negation 101

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What’s negation?

We’re referring here to statements that we make in the negative, not in the affirmative. In English this often involves using words like not, don’t, no and so on.

• No, I don’t like that

• That’s not the right way

• He couldn’t help it

• There were no kids at the party

Because sentence structure in German is (believe it or not) simpler than in English, negation is also quite easy, but there are a couple of things that we need to think about.

• which negation word to use (nicht or kein)

• the position of the negation word

This will depend on one main thing factor

• what we’re trying to negate

That’s not very helpful, so let’s cut the nonsense and get on with it.

What sort of sentences are there?

Very probably you don’t want to start here thinking about the different types of sentences, but if you’re having trouble working out where to put nicht or when to use kein then I think it’s worth persevering and casting your eye over the following.

Let’s start off looking at some sentences

What now?

Before we start trying to negate these sentences, we need to remember the basic rules for word order in ANY SENTENCE because this will determine—in part—where the negation word goes.

1. the conjugated verb is mostly in the second position, unless it follows a subordinating conjunction (like in sentence 11 above)

2. the subject and the verb are generally found right next to each other (unless it follows a subordinating conjunction (like in sentence 11 above), in which case it’s all the way over at the end of that clause.

And then we need to be able to answer the following question precisely: