Noch, zu and zum

Hi everyone,
A few more questions:

1. I have seen that “will it be finished today” is written “Wird es Heute noch fertig”. Why is it written with “noch” and can it not be written like “Wird es heute fertig”?
 
2. When do you use “zu” or “zum”?

Thanks beforehand!
 

 I don't think Wird es Heute noch fertig appears anywhere in the course, but I asked my German friend about it and it means the same as Wird es Heute fertig  but the noch adds emphasis so that you might translate is as "will it definitely be finished today".

zu means "to" and takes the dative case. zum means "to the" when the thing you are going to is masculine or neuter. It is a contraction of zu dem. It would be zur if going to something feminine.

Guten Tag RexV und sfpugh,

Thanks for your questions RexV, and for your answers sfpugh! I just wanted to add a couple of things to sfpugh's responses:

Wird es Heute noch fertig?

As sfpugh's German friend correctly pointed out, noch  can be used to add emphasis, and it can often be translated as "still" or "yet" in English. To understand exactly what sort of emphasis words like noch provide in a sentence, it can be helpful to look at a literal translation. Here, this would be: "Will it be finished yet today?" You wouldn't naturally say this in English, but you can see the sort of effect that noch has.

For a concise explanation of the many uses of noch, check out this other forum thread: https://www.rocketlanguages.com/forum/german-grammar/nach-and-noch/.

Zu

As sfpugh correctly says, zum comes from combining zu + dem, and dem is the masculine or neuter form of "the" in the dative. Similarly, zur comes from combining zu + der, and der is the feminine form of "the" in the dative.

Bis bald,

Liss