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Prepositions are a little more complicated than that, because there are idiomatic ways of expressing things that may differ from one language to another, and sometimes there are distinctions in one language that don't exist in the other.

One good example is that we commonly use the word "on" in English to express two distinct concepts ("atop" and "affixed to") and could be translated as either "auf" or "an" depending on which of the two is meant ("on the table" is "auf dem Tisch"; "on the wall" is "an die Wand"). It could even be "in" ("on the plane" = "im [short for in dem] Flugzeug"); George Carlin once did a comedy routine about how prepositions in English are sometimes not entirely logical ("Let the daredevils ride on the plane, I'm riding in the plane!") and presumably would consider the German idiom to be superior.

Okay, all that said, the most likely answer is "von", though "ab" and "aus" are also possibilities and "nach" or "vor" may be correct in some specific cases. If you really need to know exactly which to use, you'd need to give the complete sentence or at least the entire prepositional phrase.

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11y ago

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