My mom’s favorite word is ‘Nonetheless’. Well, today is my lucky day because I’m going to be telling her that back and that too in German. Today in our German class we discussed about Verbindungsadverbien (conjunctive adverbs) and over how they create logical relationships between clauses in a sentence. So, we have ‘obwohl’ and ‘trotzdem’ and they each serve a different purpose. ‘Obwohl’ stands for although in german and it connects a Haupsatz with a Nebensatz and it talks about unerwartete Gegensatze (contrast situations).

Zum Beispiel- Ich gehe nicht zum Arzt, obwohl ich erkältet bin.

Now if you look up the word ‘Trotzdem’, you’ll get all a lot of synonyms like however, still, yet, though and more. I personally think ‘despite that’ is the closest to what the word really means.

Zum Beispiel- Er verdient wenig. Trotzdem fahrt er ein teures Auto.

A couple of things to look out for while using Trotzdem is to remember that this word connects  Hauptsatz with another Hauptsatz and that it has position in a sentence so it is always followed by a verb. I personally think these are words I’ll be using for sure a lot in my daily broken attempts at speaking this complicated and yet dear to me language =)

Elza