Silly me with German sentence structures

[linguoboy]

With "in Hamburg", I feel there isn't much difference in neutrality, but in both sentences the place is important. Anyway, Er besucht in Hamburg seine Familie is likely the answer to "Was tut er in Hamburg?", whereas Er besucht seine Familie in Hamburg is the answer to "Wo besucht er seine Familie?" bzw. "Wo ist die Familie, die er besucht?" I guess that's topicality at work again?

Genau. In the first instance, in Hamburg is known information, so it moves to the front of the middle field, making room for new information at the end.

I feel like we should check in with the OP at this point to find out whether any of this discussion is helping them. (Not that we should put an end to it if it's not--this is all very useful information--but I don't want to lose sight of the raison d'être for this thread.)

[Delightfullyserene]

: wow...German is a very complex language. Thank you all for the illuminating discussion.

[linguoboy]

: wow...German is a very complex language. Thank you all for the illuminating discussion.

Have you ever seen a discussion of where to place adverbs in an English sentence? It'll make you pine for German!

[kevin]

For now, just try to remember the two basic rules that linguoboy gave you initially. The finer details about emphasis and slight semantic differences are things that you'll eventually pick up automatically as you use the language.