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The little word that could
I’ve been finding myself struggling with how many words seemed to be formed from the stem -Zug. As a word on its own der Zug is most commonly used by new speakers like myself to mean “train” and this...
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Behave Yourself!
This short phrase is one that I suspect nearly every reader who was raised in a English speaking household heard with some regularity. So common is its usage, that I was somewhat startled when I began...
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Seeing and looking out
For me, one of the best parts of learning a new language is the way it leads you to wonder anew at your mother tongue. In Dialog in Deutsch this morning we were talking about the various compounds that...
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Week 7 Anniversary
Earthquakes make the ground tremble and according to Online Etymology, the word “terrible” comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *tres- which means “to tremble.” What both earthquakes and trembling...
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That’s just super
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil,...
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Ge(e)-Whiz!
I’ve been reading a lot of Krimis written for those learning German and came across the word gestehen in one of them (http://www.klett.de/produkt/isbn/3-12-675496-1). It means “to confess” and it joins...
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Negative growth?
Since fostering growth is a key part of what I do professionally, I learned the words die Entwicklung and entwickeln – “development” and “to develop” soon after I moved to Germany. What I didn’t notice...
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All’s well that ends well?!
I was working on the vocabulary for the next section of my new favorite exercise book Wörter und Sätze and I came across the word einschenken. Since the main meaning of schenken for me is “to give a...
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Upstairs, downstairs
I needed to use the words “upstairs” and “downstairs” – treppauf and treppab – today and I realized that the morpheme »ab« was confounding me as I tried to learn which form was which. The verb with...
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Wenn Lesen glatt läuft
Dank dem Empfehlungsregal der Bücherhalle Barmbek, lese ich jetzt ein tolles Buch von Petra Hartlieb: »Meine wundervolle Buchhandlung«. Da drinnen begegnete ich dem Wort „umschiffen“ im übertragenen...
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Darauf kannst du Gift nehmen?
Seit ich Die Fremde Braut las, wusste ich, dass „wett“ eine Vorsilbe ist, weil die Autorin das Wort „wetteifer(t)en“ anwandete. Ziemlich oft begegnete ich das Wort „der Wettbewerb“, aber ich dachte...
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Extra, extra, read all about it
Walking by a local branch of Heymann, I noticed this book about Adele: While I am an Adele fan, it was the subtitle that caught my eye — Eine außergewöhnliche Karriere — for the word außergewöhnlich,...
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