For the non-Germans who want to know the source of the confusion: It’s basically the same sentence structure in German meaning something different than in English.
to has distinct meanings in “I want to listen to them” and “you should stop to listen to them”. In the first sentence, it’s effectively an article for the activity “listen to them”. In the second sentence, it implies an intent, which could be made explicit like “stop in order to listen to me”.
English uses the progressive (“stop listening”) to disambiguate with words like stop. German instead uses an additional preposition “um” for the intent meaning of to.
(In this case, the meaning difference between “interrupting something” and “stop for good” also has different words, “anhalten” and “aufhören”).
Word for word, “Aufhören zuzuhören” would mean “stop to listen”, but actually means “stop listening” while “stop to listen” would be correctly translated as “anhalten, um zuzuhören”.
For the non-Germans who want to know the source of the confusion: It’s basically the same sentence structure in German meaning something different than in English.
to has distinct meanings in “I want to listen to them” and “you should stop to listen to them”. In the first sentence, it’s effectively an article for the activity “listen to them”. In the second sentence, it implies an intent, which could be made explicit like “stop in order to listen to me”.
English uses the progressive (“stop listening”) to disambiguate with words like stop. German instead uses an additional preposition “um” for the intent meaning of to.
(In this case, the meaning difference between “interrupting something” and “stop for good” also has different words, “anhalten” and “aufhören”).
Word for word, “Aufhören zuzuhören” would mean “stop to listen”, but actually means “stop listening” while “stop to listen” would be correctly translated as “anhalten, um zuzuhören”.