No. 47 in German
was
"Was" means "what" in English.
In a sentence
Was machst du gerade?
What are you doing right now?
In this sentence, 'was' serves as an interrogative pronoun to ask about an action or activity.
Das war nicht das, was ich erwartet habe.
That was not what I expected.
Here, 'was' is used as a relative pronoun to indicate the subject of the verb 'expected'.
Ich esse das, was mir schmeckt.
I eat what I like.
In this example, 'was' again serves as a relative pronoun to denote something undefined that is being specified by the clause 'mir schmeckt'.
Hear it in real podcasts
The recording above is a synthetic voice. Hear how people say “was” in actual German podcasts.
Find “was” in podcastsLearn it from shows you like
LangTurbo plays German podcasts with a transcript and the English under every line. Tap a word like this one and it tells you what it means right there. For iPhone, iPad and Android.
Learning English?
LangTurbo plays real English podcasts with every line translated into Deutsch, and tells you what any word means in that sentence. For iPhone, iPad and Android.
German books and courses on Amazon (an affiliate link: a purchase through it supports this site).