Adverbs of place and direction

Right now: three questions, one map

Shortcuthin = away from me · her = toward me. German measures direction from where the speaker stands. English hardly has a word for this (only fossils like “hither” and “thither”), so learners keep skipping it.

First the skeleton. German splits questions about place into three, and each one has its own words:

You already do this in English

You build the difference between “come here” and “stay there” without thinking. German has the same split, just in separate words:

• hier here WO · POSITION
• hierher to here WOHIN · MOTION
• dort there WO · POSITION
• dorthin to there WOHIN · MOTION
• von dort from there WOHER · SOURCE

The pattern is simple: the position word gets -her or -hin and now means “to”, and von in front means “from”. It matches the English “to there / from there” almost one to one.

da and dort both mean “there”. The difference: dort really points far away, while da is looser in everyday speech, like “right there / here you go” — Ich bin da! = “I’m here!”

hin and her — the real topic

These two syllables are the most un-English part of German. They have no meaning of their own; they mark direction relative to the speaker. One-sentence rule:

• hin → AWAY from the speaker GEH HIN · GO THERE
• ← her TOWARD the speaker KOMM HER · COME HERE

When two people describe the same event, the word changes — it depends on where the speaker is standing:

Both stick to the front of prepositions and build a pair of directions. You will hear these patterns all the time in German:

In spoken German both get shortened, and you will hear rein · raus · rauf · runter · rüber almost every time. They are not rude, just everyday:

City, country, home: which preposition

This trio is where place prepositions go wrong most often. English says “to” for all of them, German splits it three ways:

The part nobody tells you: hin/her turn into separable verbs

hin and her do not only stand alone — they attach to the front of a verb and make a separable verb. And then they jump to the end of the sentence.

So do not be thrown when you see a hin or her at the end of a German sentence: it is not a preposition, it is the broken-off part of the verb. We explain how separable verbs work in detail on the separable verbs page.

• hingehen — to go there · Ich gehe hin.
• herkommen — to come here · Komm her!
• sich hinsetzen — to sit down · Setz dich hin.
• hinlegen — to lay down / put down · Leg es hin.
• herbringen — to bring here · Bring es her.

Question words split by the same logic: Wohin gehst du? (where to) and Woher kommst du? (where from). In spoken German the two can even be pulled apart: Wo gehst du hin? — that is also correct and very common.

What to do this week

Place language sticks when you walk around your home. A five-day exercise, two minutes a day:

• When you move from one spot at home to another, build the sentence: Ich gehe in die Küche. Jetzt bin ich in der Küche. — hear the Akkusativ → Dativ switch with your own ears.
• Call someone to you: Komm her! Then send them away: Geh hin! Say both back to back and the difference settles in.
• Write your weekly plan with three prepositions: Am Montag gehe ich zum Arzt, am Dienstag nach Köln, am Mittwoch bleibe ich zu Hause.
• When you hear rein · raus · rauf · runter in a German series, make a note — they are all shortened forms of the long ones on this page.

Next up is joining sentences: und · aber · denn leave the word order alone, deshalb flips it.