Type a verb or adjective and see the preposition it takes. wachten op, denken aan, bang voor.
in de kamer
op tafel
aan de muur
onder het bed
boven de kast
naast het huis
tussen de bomen
voor de deur
achter het huis
bij de dokter
over de brug
door het park
naar huis
van mijn moeder
met de trein
tegen de muur
wachten op, denken aan, houden van — fixed-preposition combinations you just have to know. Look any verb up in a second.
It's not just verbs: bang voor, trots op, afhankelijk van. The tool covers the adjective + preposition pairs too.
Every entry comes with a natural A2 sentence and its English translation, so you see the preposition doing its job.
A fixed preposition is the specific preposition that a verb, adjective or noun always takes — for example wachten op (wait for), denken aan (think of), bang voor (afraid of). They rarely match the English preposition, so you can't translate them directly; you have to learn each pair. This tool lists 58 of the most common ones with examples.
Wachten op. In Dutch you 'wait ON' something: Ik wacht op de bus. Even though English says 'wait FOR', the Dutch fixed preposition is op. That mismatch is exactly why these need to be memorised rather than translated.
Both are correct but mean different things. 'Op tafel' means physically on the table's surface (het boek ligt op tafel). 'Aan tafel' means at the table, as in seated for a meal (we zitten aan tafel). Dutch uses different prepositions for position versus activity, which is a common source of mistakes.
Learn the whole chunk, not the words separately — memorise 'luisteren naar' as one unit, the way you'd learn a word. Practising with example sentences (as this tool shows) fixes the combination in your memory far better than a bare list, and the fixed prepositions come up constantly in the A2 exam.