We are dedicating this blog article to specific crossed wires that cause speakers of German as a foreign language to make a rather simple and repetitious mistake, albeit not of such gravity that it would leave the speaker’s counterpart baffled, but the mistake does crop up many a time when learning German: the correct use of the nouns Zeit and Mal and the German adverb mal.
Speakers of German at level B1 or learners on their way to achieving this level would be expected to employ the correct word. English speakers, in particular, find this problematic as English simply deploys the word time(s) when expressing something that happens or has been happening with frequency. As the German equivalent for the English word time is Zeit, this mistake is easily made should the speaker not bear in mind that they ought to have an altogether different word in their German repertoire for describing a point in time – the word Mal.
For example, “He is the third time in Germany.” In this scenario, German does not use the noun Zeit as the English speaker would be inclined, but the noun Mal: Er ist das dritte Mal in Deutschland (the ordinal number is, in this case, declined like an adjective ending in -e as the article gives away the gender of the noun Mal).
Looking back, we would say He’s been to Germany three times. In German, this is: Er war dreimal in Deutschland. Here, the adverb mal is used and compounded with a quantifier.
Other compounded versions of mal are diesmal (this time), keinmal (not once), manchmal (sometimes), vielmal-s (many times).
There is also the particle mal, which the German language uses to add a certain casualness to a statement. It is unconnected to mal when expressing frequency.
If this short elaboration roused your interest, then get in touch for more German!