Introduction:
I found this bench in nature and the carving “Hier ist es schön” caught my attention. I definitely agreed with the inscription. Let’s see what it means…
Words used:
| Hier | Here |
| ist | is |
| es | it |
| schön | beautiful |
Literal Translation:
It is beautiful here
Alternative Translations:
It’s nice here / It’s lovely here
Bonus:
I tried to find out what the washed-out reply means. Some letters are barely still visible but checking the remaining letters, it can only mean “Das stimmt nicht!”. So, if I am right, what does that mean?
Words used:
| Das | That |
| stimmt | right / true |
| nicht | not |
Combined words:
| stimmt nicht | not true / not right |
Literal Translation:
That’s not true!
So, as you can see, someone disagreed with the carving. However, I agreed because I found the bench in nature and it was a very beautiful place. I guess, whoever disagreed, did so for the fun of it. It was probably a group of teenagers.
Last Words:
When I found the photo in my library, it inspired me to create this mini German lesson. Bear with me, I am not a teacher, thus I can’t throw a lot of grammatical terms at you. But maybe it was interesting nonetheless, especially for those who like the German language. I could imagine doing similar posts in the future if I find more photos with German sentences or words. But excuse me, this is not a promise. Here is the photo I used in black and white…
Diary of Dennis 
I was pleased that I remembered enough high school German to translate this more or less correctly.
Fantastic! 🙂 I wondered if I should add an example conversation and I actually wrote one but featured out that it would do both, add complexity, and much more vocabulary. Not to mention that I ran very fast into some words that aren’t as easily translated into English or tenses that would increase the difficulty a lot. So, I thought I keep it simple for now. I will pay attention to more text when I am outside, maybe I find something else for a second mini lesson.
I also wondered if you can reverse it in English as we can in German…
In German we can say “Hier ist es schön” or “Es ist schön hier”.
Can you say “Here it is beautiful” in English? It somehow reads strange, which is why I have chosen “It is beautiful here” as a literal translation. I believe it would work if you break it up by a comma, like “Here, it is beautiful”?
Ausgezeichnet!
Danke! 🙂