What is going on grammatically here? It looks like “reden” is an infinitive…I’m not familiar with this construction in German and it doesn’t seem to correspond to anything I am familiar with in English either. It might help if I could have more examples of a similar construction.
1 Like
I’m by no means advanced, but it looks just like a perfect tense. Only ‘haben’ is conjugated in this situation, while the other verb goes to the end of the sentence and stays in infinitive.
No, the perfect tense in German would be “Du hast…gesprochen.” I.e. it uses the past participle, not the infinitive. It is more-or-less equivalent to the English “You have spoken.” Using the infinitive here has a different meaning, if it is not a typo or error. I’m not a native speaker so I don’t know whether or not this is correct, nor do I really understand what this means. I’d really appreciate it if a native speaker could chime in here because this one confuses me.
“Du hast leicht/gut reden” is a set phrase. It means “That’s easy for you to say”.
I cannot explain the grammar. It does not seem to fit into (modern) German grammar rules. Archaic German is a bit different.
A modernized version of this sentence may look something like “Du hast es leicht, zu reden.”
There are other set phrases with similar constructions:
Mit dem ist nicht gut Kirschen essen. - He is hard to get along with. (he’s an unpleasant person), or: You better don’t mess with him, watch out.
Wiktionary says this particular expression may go back to some bishop in the year 1293.
So you can see just how old these can be. It’s like Shakespearean English is to you.
You’ll just have to take these fossiles as they are and move along.
8 Likes