Englisches “if” auf Deutsch

Question

Welches Wort ist richtig für if-Sätze?

Zum Beispiel sagt man auf Englisch:

Take more if you like it.
If you want you can do it.
We are going out if it is sunny.

Ganz einfach, aber schwierig für einen Anfänger, der dies ins Deutsche übersetzt. Im Wörterbuch kann man viele Übersetzungen für if finden:

• wenn
• ob
• falls
• sofern
• soweit

Welches Wort passt in meinen Beispielen?

Ich glaube, dass wenn passt:

Nimm mehr, wenn du es magst.
Wenn du willst, kannst du es machen.
Wir gehen raus, wenn es sonnig ist.

Answer 1

Deine Beispiele sind einfache Konditionalsätze. Du kannst also die synonymen wenn, falls, sofern oder soweit benutzen. sofern und insbesondere soweit entstammen allerdings einem anderen Sprachregister als deine Beispiele. Am besten sind also wenn und falls.

Answer 2

To add to Toscho's answer: "ob" can be translated as "whether", so that makes it a bad fit for your examples. "Weisst Du, ob sie morgen kommt?" would be "Do you know if / whether she'll come tomorrow?"

Answer 3

There are different usages of the English word "if" which will give different translations. In your three sentences you can replace "if" with "in case":

Take more in case you like it. In case you want you can do it. We are going out in case it is sunny.

In other situations you can replace "if" with "whether":

I asked my friend if/whether he was hungry.

Wenn / falls / sofern / soweit können im ersten Fall benutzt werden, mit feinen Unterschieden in der Bedeutung. "Ob" für den zweiten Fall.

Answer 4

Most commonly if is translated as wenn.

Historically/Semantically wenn has a temporal component (as in the English when and the German wann), while falls is more straight-forward conditional.
In the spoken language and informal written language the use of the conditional wenn is widely accepted.

The conditional wenn and falls also seem to have slightly different connotations regarding certainty and/or desirability of a future event. During my time as university student in German Linguistics my student group and I wrote a paper on that after having interviewed 200 students. We came to the conclusion that a significant (over 85%) amount of the students used falls when talking about a possible event in the future that later was described as being undesired, while wenn was used to describe neutral or positive possibilities. Also, in slightly different context with all positive possibilities, wenn was used to refer to future events where the student was leaning towards "it's likely that this will happen", while falls was used in cases where the student thought the event to be unlikely to occur.

Please note that this was just a simple research project for a paper. The tendencies we found were significant within our data, but the sample data was rather small and might have some unaccounted local bias to it – it's an interesting observation that fit's well my with personal experience, but it's not representative.