Is “Machst du bitte…” a natural way to make polite requests in German?
Hi, I’m learning German and I have a question about how requests work in German.
In English, I feel like we normally say “Can you…?” or “Could you…?” when we want to make a request.
But in German, I often see sentences like “Machst du bitte das Fenster auf?” or “Packst du bitte den Koffer aus?”, which are also used to express polite requests rather than literal yes/no questions.
So my questions are:
What is the difference between “Packst du bitte den Koffer aus?” and “Kannst du bitte den Koffer auspacken?” in German?
Are both of them natural in everyday spoken German, or is one of them more common or more polite than the other?
In real conversation, do German speakers prefer one structure over the other?
I also saw this sentence in a Goethe A2 word list: “Rufst du bitte die Kinder. Das Essen ist fertig.”
Why does the first sentence end with a full stop instead of a question mark? 🤔Isn’t it a yes/no question in form?
I have a question about punctuation in German.
“Rufst du bitte die Kinder. Das Essen ist fertig.”
My understanding is that “Rufst du bitte die Kinder” has the structure of a yes/no question in German (verb-second word order with “du”), even though it is used as a polite request rather than a real question.
Because of that, I would expect the correct written form to be:
“Rufst du bitte die Kinder? Das Essen ist fertig.”
However, I have also seen people use a full stop instead of a question mark in similar spoken-style sentences, almost as if the sentence is functioning more like a statement in terms of intonation and communication.
So my question is:
Is the version with the full stop (Rufst du bitte die Kinder.) actually considered correct or acceptable in standard written German, or should it always be written with a question mark since the grammatical structure is still a yes/no question, regardless of the pragmatic meaning?