Context: I’m missing a cutting board. So I wrote in our telegram family group: “Wo ist eigentlich unser zweites großes Schneidebrett hin?” (literally: “Where is actually our second big cuttingboard thither?”).
By using the modal particle “eigentlich” I insinuate that something is oddly off and express an emotional state of curiousity and/or mild discontent.
By adding “hin”, I notify that I ask because it is not where it is supposed to be and not because I don’t know where it should be.
Now I ask myself, how would I express this additional information in English?
Edit: Thank you all for your answers! I learned a lot. Just our cutting board is still gone, and probably enjoying it’s freedom somewhere … I suppose.
German Modalpartikeln are rather unique to the language, so really hard to translate. To convey the same “feeling” you’d probably need to rely on other resources, like:
For example, I feel like your sentence could be translated like “Our second cutting board is curiously missing. Does anyone know where it is?”. That “curiously” performing a similar job as “eigentlich”, and the indirect phrasing of the second sentence highlighting that you have no clue on where it is. It’s still missing the “it is not here” connotation of “hin”, but I guess that it’s good enough?
[Caveat lector: I’m not fully proficient in English, and certainly not in German. So… yeah.]
“is curiously missing” could also be replaced with other verbs that capture the unexpected / curious nature of its absence such as “has vanished” or “has disappeared”.
Those could work, too. It’s a good example of using synonyms to give different connotations - all those words convey that the cutting board is not there, but in different ways.
Vanished/disappeared is of course impossible literally but, colloquially, it definitely suggests something unusual happened without directly sounding accusatory. To me it reads a bit more lighthearted than other options. And I don’t think it would be misinterpreted in text form.
Dad would always say, “Who took the cutting board?” And not in a nice way lol.
You seem to be doing alright. How do you think you might improve that proficiency even further?
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My recommendation is to read Stephen King.
Here’s a website that lists all his books in publication order. I’m reading them from earliest to most recent (I’m at about 1990 currently): https://www.deadgoodbooks.co.uk/profile-stephen-king/
He’s a good storyteller, he uses colloquial language, and even as a native speaker I always learn new words with every one of his books he writes. For example, I learned from reading the Tommyknockers that the word “depend” can mean “to hang from”, as in “The moss depended from the branch of the tree”.
Also, I think I’ve only seen one typo in all the books I’ve read of his so far. I’ve read about 20 (all of them up to Tommyknockers), and there was one spelling error somewhere in Christine. So it’s extremely well-edited, well-proofread.
Reading on kindle paperwhite is amazing because you can long press any word to get its definition. So much faster than trying to look it up in a dictionary, even a digital one.
Really though, any fiction is good for that. Fiction will fill in an intuitive understanding of at/on/in for example, simply by presenting each word hundreds of time in correct context.
The rules we write down to describe grammar aren’t really how it’s defined; we just write those down for fun. Grammar is really defined, and learned, the way machine learning works: tons of examples. I couldn’t tell you the rules for those words, for instance. I could try, and come up with something, but it wouldn’t convey everything I know because the knowledge is unconscious.