Piggy pedagogy

Piggy pedagogy

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Idiom in focus 1: anvertrauen (jemandem etwas; sich jemandem)

I'm renaming this excercise because it has very quickly become clear that one day will not suffice to work the expression in a really meaningful way. So now I will keep a particular idiom "in focus" until I feel we have explored it a sufficient syntactic and semantic depth. 

With anvertrauen, for example, it takes awhile to generate enough conversation such as to cover the two basic usages, one involving a direct object (jemandem etwas anvertrauen, "to entrust/confide something to somebody") and one reflexive (sich jemandem anvertrauen, "to confide in somebody"). So far I have used the former with J but not yet the latter.

Plus it is necessary to exploit the different syntactical possibilities involving the seperable prefix. 

1. Ich habe auch ein paar weitere Geheimnisse aus meiner Kindheit, die ich dir später anvertrauen werde.

2. Ich habe auch ein paar weitere Geheimnisse aus meiner Kindheit, die vertraue ich dir später an

I did manage to use both of these this morning, but they bear a lot of repetition.

Update 4.4.15: J used this expression with me this morning, after two days of repeated usage by me in various contexts. 

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