About This Book

137 deutsche Praepositionen is a reference book devoted entirely to German prepositions — the whole class of them, 137 by its title’s own count. It exists because prepositions occupy a unique position in German: few in number beside the open classes, but governing in effect, since each preposition dictates the case of its phrase and many dictate meaning differences that no translation table survives. A book that gathers the entire set in one place treats them with the completeness their influence deserves.

The preposition problem is unlike any other in German learning. Nouns can be learned as they come; verbs conjugate by learnable patterns; but prepositions must be known individually — their government memorised, their idiomatic territories mapped, their overlap zones negotiated — and there is no shortcut through them except completeness. One hundred and thirty-seven is therefore the most encouraging number in German grammar: the size of the whole problem, stated on the cover. What can be counted can be finished, and a reference organised around finishing the set serves learners differently from a grammar that samples it.

What Learners Will Practise

Government, Word by Word

Learners practise the case each preposition commands until the pairing is automatic: the preposition recognised, its case produced without deliberation. This is drill at the level where German accuracy is actually decided — the small word chosen, the endings behind it falling correctly into place — repeated across the whole governing set rather than its famous few.

Meanings in Their Territories

The book trains the semantic side: one preposition’s several territories — place, time, manner, cause — and the borders where two prepositions contest the same ground. Learners practise choosing by territory rather than by translation, because prepositions map differently in every language and the English gloss is the beginner’s most reliable traitor.

The Idiomatic Residue

Learners practise the fixed phrases where prepositions live fossilised — verbs and adjectives that demand their particular preposition as a condition of meaning. These partnerships are pure convention, learnable only as wholes, and a complete preposition reference is where they are all findable: the set’s last, least logical province, annexed by listing.

Key Features

The completeness is the feature: the entire class, counted in the title, with nothing governing left outside. The single-topic depth is the second — prepositions studied as a system, their patterns visible across the set — and the reference design the third, a book built for the moment of doubt as much as for study. In this collection it is the German shelf’s annexation of the little words: small territory, permanent peace.

Who This Book Is For

Learners whose errors cluster at the small words are its first readers — a diagnosable majority at every level. Students preparing for examinations form its second readership, preposition government being among the most reliably tested and most reliably lost marks. Teachers make its third: the whole set, in one volume, is the staffroom’s final court for the staffroom’s commonest dispute.

How to Use This Book

Study it in families — by case governed, by territory held — rather than alphabetically, so the set’s patterns do half the memorising. Keep it within reach while writing, and look up the doubt every time; preposition errors are cheap to check and expensive to practise in. Return across months: the class is finite, and each return finds fewer strangers, until the book’s final use arrives — the year its 137 have all become reflexes and the volume retires undefeated.

Related Books

The wider system the prepositions govern inside is summarised with its answers at Deutsche Grammatik. mit Lösungen, and the essentials are framed at Essential German Grammar.