Questions & Answers about Die Bahn kommt.
The translation says "is coming", but the German word is just kommt. Where is the "is"?
German doesn't have a continuous "is doing" tense like English does. Whether the train "comes" every day or "is coming" right now, German simply uses the basic present tense: Die Bahn kommt.
Why is Bahn translated as "train" here? Isn't the German word for train Zug?
Der Zug is the standard word for train, but die Bahn is very common too! It literally means "railway" or "track", but Germans frequently use it to mean the train itself. You will also see it in transit words like U-Bahn (subway) and S-Bahn (city train).
Our current lesson is about verbs that change their vowels. Does kommen have a vowel change here?
No, it does not! Even though kommen (to come) is an irregular verb in the past tense, it behaves completely normally in the present tense. Because die Bahn is a third-person subject (like he, she, or it), we just add the standard -t ending to the stem to get kommt. There is no vowel change.
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