Berg ≠ Burg

Back to the future?

2019-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

When you need to postpone an appointment, in German that’s a Verschiebung. Most frequently, at least where I work, Termine werden nach hinten verschoben, i.e. rescheduled to a point in the future.

Nach hinten? Wirklich?

Let’s think about that for a minute.

I always thought Nach hinten means “behind {you|me|us}.” Postponing something means to push it off into the future. Behind you.

Are German-speakers oriented on the past? Here is a very crude ASCII diagram depicting my point.

+-----------------------------------+
|                O                  |
|  |<--------- +-|-+ --------->|    |
|  past       __/^\__       future  |
|           des san mia             |
|          (das sind wir)           |
+-----------------------------------+

If nach hinten is behind you, and it also means the future, then you must be facing the past. Right?

Wir müssen den Termin um zwei Wochen nach Hinten verschieben.

My native English-speaking gut tells me the equivalent expression in English would be:

“We’re going to have to push that meeting off by two weeks.”

Or maybe:

“We’re going to have to push that meeting back by two weeks.”

Aha. Push it back. As if the appointment had a face, is facing us, and we want to move the date of the meeting to a point on the timeline behind the appointment. Bonus crude ASCII diagram:

+------------------------------------------------------+
|               O - Hi.     Sup? -  O                  |
| |<--------- +-|-+ ----------    +-|-+  ---------->|  |
| past       __/^\__             __/^\__       future  |
|                                                      |
|              us           the appointment            |
+------------------------------------------------------+

Is that what they mean by nach hinten?

Feuer Frei

2018-12-31T10:57:34+00:00

Freedom is a complex topic. German complicates matters with the word frei and derivatives.

Meanings

I’ll argue there are (at least) three or four general meanings to words based on frei. In some contexts, they seem contradictory, or at least not clearly separate. Native English speakers: before you get all judgy, heads up! We have the same ambiguity in our Muttersprache. Of course that’s because “free” has linguistic kinship with frei, but I think there’s more to it than that. We use “free” in all these ways, too.

allowed, available or exempt
lacking (or prohibited?)
gratis or libre: kostenlos
outdoors

Allowed, Available or Exempt

For this meaning of frei, think “Bill of Rights” – freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom from oppression, stuff like that. There are places named after this kind of freedom: Münchener Freiheit and Danziger Freiheit come to mind (even though it’s the same place!). The Befreiungshalle in Kelheim probably warrants a visit (we keep meaning to…). King Ludwig I was so happy to be free of the French (i.e., libéré des Français, not les Forces françaises libres) that he had this monument built over 20 years in the middle of the 19th century.

“Entschuldigung, ist hier noch frei?”

Apparently this brain is hiring bodies.

Anyone who’s been in Germany for ten minutes has learned that phrase. But it’s not just about a place to sit. It can refer to many kinds of availability.

On traffic signs, frei means “the indicated type of traffic is exempt from the rule we just stated.” Thus, this waterfront area on the Danube is a pedestrian zone, but bikes are cool. Oh, also delivery traffic at certain times of day. Oh yeah, and taxis can drive up to the ships. But maybe only if they’re bus-shaped taxis?

Lacking (or Prohibited?)

Beer/pasta/cola with no alcohol/gluten/caffeine in it? That’s a alkohol-/gluten-/koffeinfreies Getränk. That seems pretty clear. But is an arbeitsfreier Tag one on which you are prohibited from working or just a day that lacks work? And it seems pretty clear that a rauchfreies Hotelzimmer is not merely one that has not been smoked in — smoking in one of those is certainly prohibited and will net you a fine.

Gratis or Libre: kostenlos

I bought my mom this Glarkware tee-shirt a few years back. I'm not sure I agree anymore. Life in Germany has taught me it's more of an investment with an intangible pay-off.

Gratis means you don’t have to pay for it. Libre means you can do what you want with it. Frei can mean either (or both) of those things. Freibier is an admirable concept. But despite a superficial resemblance, a Freibad is neither libre (you gotta follow their rules) nor gratis (one of which is paying admission).

Outdoors

“Open-air” is the term I think of when frei is used in connection with a venue. The excellent Österreichisches Freilichtmuseum is a perfect embodiment of this concept. Go visit it on a nice day when you’re near Graz.

Deutsch	English	In the sense of/See also/Notes
Freilichtmuseum	open-air museum
Freibad	open-air swimming pool
Freibier	free beer!	gratis
Freigabe	release, approval	-gabe is derived from geben
Freizeit	free time	allowed
Befreiung	liberation	libre (duh...)
Freier	john (as in, sex worker's customer)	German wikipedia has the scoop on that. The verb freien doesn't mean what I thought it meant.
Gefreiter	ummm…Corporal?	a military rank low on the totem pole in German-speaking armies
Freistaat	Free State (in an official title)	Wikipedia has more on this!
freilich	sure, clearly	It's a thing in southern German dialects, used frequently to assert the positivity of a response to a question. Darf ich mich zu Dir setzen? Na, freilich!
Freiberufler	independent practitioner of an occupation	Check Wikipedia for more.
freiwillig	voluntarily	It was your own free will that motivated you to do it.
freilaufend	free-range	tastes better in your conscience!
frei Haus	???	In a commercial arrangement, the seller pays the shipping costs under a frei Haus agreement. But that doesn't cover the product liability or insurance or any other aspects of the delivery in the the transaction. See Wikipedia for more.
das Freie / im Freien	the outdoors
einwandfrei		This is really hard to translate. Maybe the best way is to think of it as the equivalent of the "Can't complain!" answer to the "How's it goin'" greeting. Flula has a nice explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIh7KyqZcoE
freischalten	to unlock, enable, activate	Very useful in terms of user permissions.
freimachen	to frank	It's the same as frankieren (to pre-pay postage), but more ambiguous, because it also means to clear or vacate or free up (memory on your computer).

Let’s close it out with an important thought going back to the High Middle Ages but more recently put to good use again – might need to that one in our backpocket:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVc0wBLri1A

And now, on the last day of the year, here in Germany, it’s getting really close to midnight, so break out those fireworks if you don’t worry about various kinds of pollution and scaring any animals, and …

FEUER FREI

Exhausted Creature Achieved

2015-12-31T18:12:33+00:00

"Ladle steel 18j07" by Snowmanradio - Own work. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.

We've achieved a lot this year. It's wearing me out. But we're getting through it and the year is nearly exhausted, as well. A few related words with a common root ¹ are useful here.

schöpfen
schaffen

schöpfen

It means to create. Or to scoop, as in dip or ladle. You can derive a whole bunch of words from this one.

Schöpfung

Creation, in the grander religious or philosophical sense.

Schöpflöffel

Ladle, like for serving soup.

Erschöpfung

Physiological exhaustion; when all the energy has been scooped out of the soup terrine that is your being.

Geldschöpfung / Wertschöpfung

Corporate-speak: "value-add." At least the German version feels less like a Bullshit Bingo double-score square.

Ausschöpfung

Also exhaustion, but maybe less pertinent to the human condition. Think "exhaustion of available resources."

Geschöpf

Creature, like a monster or mythical being, but also like "creature of habit."

unerschöpflich

Inexhaustible. The opposite of this list.

schaffen

This one is tricky because it's almost like two different verbs, subtly different in their meanings and visibly distinct only in their past-tense forms.

schaffen (weak conjugation)

schaffen / schaffte / geschafft

to accomplish something
to achieve something
to manage (to do) something
to work (in Southern dialects)

schaffen (strong conjugation)

schaffen / schuf / geschaffen

to create
to execute (a work of art)

Abschaffung

Abolition. From the transitive one, past tenseschaffte, abgeschafft.

Anschaffung

Acquisition, in the commercial sense.

Beschaffung

Procurement. Work in a large corporate environment? Surely you've seen utterly superfluous busy-work processes and projects and immediately identified them as Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahmen (ABM), even if you didn't know that word for the at the time.

freischaffend

Self-employed. Which could the motivation for a Kapitalbeschaffung or the result of your Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahme failing.

Kapitalbeschaffung

The raising of funds.

Schaffensfreude

Kind of a polar opposite to every foreigner's favorite German word Schadenfreude, this means "creative enthusiasm." It's great when you've got it, and insufferable when someone else does.

Schaffner

The guy who checks your ticket on the train. Is he creating something? Achieving something? Managing something? Or just working?

That wraps up 2015 for us -- jetzt sind wir erschöpft und die Zeit ausgeschöpft, und wir haben es gerade noch geschafft.

Frohes Schaffen in 2016!

1. in Old High German; see their entries on DWDS. ↑

Isst der Osterhase zu Ostern Obst von der Ostsee? Oft!

2015-04-04T09:20:58+00:00

It's getting to be that time of year again, when the days are longer (Dank der Umstellung auf Sommerzeit), das Gras ist grüner, and everybody wants to wish you Frohe Ostern!

Let us embrace the cycle of rebirth and reconciliation by getting the pronunciation right.

You probably learned that die Post and die Ostsee are pronounced with a short 'o,' kind of the same vowel sound you hear generic British people use on the word 'box.' I always thought that was because of the two consonants following it.

But it's a much longer 'o' sound in words like Obst and Ostern and their derivatives, and they have two or even three consonants following the vowel. What's up with that?

Who knows. Maybe it's one of the (thankfully few) areas of German that will not be governed by rules.

Here are some more potentially tricky Pärchen:

Long		Short

die Geste	gesture	die Gäste (der Gast)	guests
das Gefäß	vessel	zuverlässig	reliable
das Buch	book	die Bucht	bay
jemand sucht	someone searches for	die Sucht	addiction
der Schoß	lap	schoss	shot, preterite of schießen
koksen	to do cocaine	Oktober	October
das Frühstück	breakfast	das Frühstück	breakfast

Some of them are easier to spot than others; particularly Frühstück, with its vowel-lengthening h and shortening ck, seems logisch. If you're on board with the spelling reforms of the 1990s, the ß vs. ss thing can help you identify long/short dichotomies, provided it's not an all caps setting. ¹

The guidelines for short and long vowel sounds seem rather unzuverlässig at best. Maybe you have to treat these little nuggets of German wisdom like Ostereier and scoop them up wherever you can find them.

Share the ones you've found in the comments, please!

Frohe Ostern!

Editorial note: a tip o' the hat tip to @smarterGerman for some corrections to a previous version of this post.

1. ß is never a capital letter! ↑

Stake your claim with verbal building blocks

2015-01-25T11:00:45+00:00

Many learners of German appreciate it for its stackable properties. You can link otherwise unrelated concepts together into one word, and if you recognize the individual pieces, very often the sum total meaning of the word is a snap. Let's take Inanspruchnahme as an example. You may have seen it in the fine print of various types of service contracts: insurance, telecommunications, and the like.

in Anspruch nehmen

Inanspruchnahme is a nounified verb ¹. In Anspruch nehmen means "to make use of," "lay claim upon," or in the legal sense, "to exercise (a right)." Let's divide and conquer, starting off verkehrt with nehmen.

"Hey, do you need help moving to your new apartment this weekend?"

"Nein, danke, im ersten Schritt nicht, aber vielleicht nächstes Wochenende nehme ich das tolle Angebot gerne in Anspruch."

The construction in Anspruch, even though it's always written separately from nehmen, works just like a separable-prefix: the main part of the verb (nehmen) goes where you'd expect in the sentence structure. ²

nahme

Nehmen means "to take" and is an i→ie stem-changer in the present tense, so you know it's going to have a checkered past, as well.

Präsens
ich nehme	wir nehmen
du nimmst	ihr nehmt
er/sie/es nimmt	sie/Sie nehmen

Präteritum
ich nahm	wir nahmen
du nahmst	ihr nahmt
er/sie/es nahm	sie/Sie nahmen

And for good measure:

Partizip Perfekt
haben	genommen

But it's really the preterite stem that's useful to us here: nahm. Throw an -e on it and consider it the nounified form of "to take," or perhaps "taking." You find that it in other useful contexts, as well:

German	Denglisch	English
die Abnahme	take down	weight loss, decrease, acceptance
die Aufnahme	take up	recording, admission (to a hospital)
die Ausnahme	take out	exception
die Einnahme	take in	ingestion
die Kenntnisnahme	take notice	attention
die Stellungnahme	take a stand	taking of a position (in a debate)
die Teilnahme	take part	participation
die Übernahme		takeover
die Zunahme	take toward	weight gain, increase

der Anspruch

Likewise Anspruch is another verb hiding in noun's clothing. You may recognize the verb ansprechen as "to address" as in "to speak to someone," but did you know it also means "to address (a problem or topic)"? If we tromp through the conjugation patterns of sprechen, (it is also an i→ie stem-changer) we won't find a mention of Spruch. ³ But you find sprechen in one of its nounified forms all over the courtroom:

der Ausspruch ⁴
der Einspruch
der Freispruch
der Urteilsspruch
der Widerspruch

der Anspruch is a claim, entitlement, or demand, and something that is anspruchsvoll is demanding. Surely you know someone with an inflated sense of entitlement: das ist ein anspruchsvoller Mensch.

In

What's the point of the in here then? We've established nahme, Spruch, and Anspruch.

Well, in is the activator. Your option, resource, alternative, can of Whoop-Ass, etc. exists, theoretically, whether you make use of it or not. You need to take it off the shelf and get it ready for deployment. You do that when you take it in Anspruch.

Inanspruchnahme

Verbs:
ansprechen + nehmen

Nouns:
Anspruch + nahme ⁵

Then fire it up with in as the catalyst.

in + anspruch + nahme = Inanspruchnahme

Thus Inanspruchnahme is the act of availing one's self of something.

In the spirit of putting it all together, and equipping one's self for future glory, here's a familiar usage of Sprach.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0z_8Gj7wgE

Now go make use of your new tools.

1. So is 'nounification.' They're real words if we say they are. ↑

2. That is to say, in the second position in main clauses, or reattached at the end of a Nebensatz. Except that it's not even fully reattached by writing convention. ↑

3. The stem changes in the preterite forms to a and o in the past participle. Keep reading for a subtle shout-out to sprach. ↑

4. Not to be confused with die Aussprache! ↑

5. nahme is not a noun on its own; it needs a preposition or other noun when it goes out in noun drag. ↑

Bad Gender and Backwards Traffic

2015-01-06T08:03:34+00:00

das Geschlecht

Is there anything inherently bad about gender?

No, of course not!

says the modern, well-educated thinker. ¹

And yet, one can't help but shake the impression that gender, or at least the physiological aspects, have a negative tinge to them. If one is a foreign observer of German, that is.

How's that? Because Geschlecht.

"Bad!" leaps out at you from the German word for "gender." Or "sex," in some contexts. ² Schlecht is one of those words you taught yourself to stumble through upon arrival ins Vaterland while explaining your lack of language prowess to the nice border control people at the airport.

Entschuldigung, mein Deutsch ist sehr schlecht.

And when you spray them with that combo of CH and T at the end, you'll have convinced them. ³ See here for help with that CH-precipitation.

But I digress. Let's come back to gender: what can we conclude about it? Is it truly linked to bad, evil, sub-par-ness or other negativity, somewhere deep in the psyche of the typical native speaker?

"No, of course not -- not anymore, at least." We'd like to think that. But consider that the last bastion of defense of your Geschlechtsteile, unless you've taken measures to the contrary, are nearby, both physiologically and emotionally: your Schamhaare -- "shame hairs."

Reluctance to Drop Trou

Have you ever caught a German colleague in a mistake he's made and was hoping no one would notice? If he acknowledges his misfortune at all, you may hear him dejectedly admit:

Mei, da muss ich wohl die Hose runterlassen...

This would imply that he's not really looking forward to exposing his bits. It's an expression about facing up to your shame, which is normally kept properly stowed in your pants. ⁴

der Verkehr

It means "traffic," as a noun. But watch out -- when it's a past participle serving as an adverb or adjective, as in verkehrt, it means "backwards," and usually denotes something did not go as planned. Kind of like how "backwards" as an adjective in English implies developmental difficulty.

der Geschlechtsverkehr

Literally, "gender traffic," it's a cold, clinical way of describing...yeah, just what you thought. Though one of the translations for Verkehr I found was "communion," which at first sounds kind of nice, until I was reminded of a certain sacrament from my Catholic upbringing.

1. "Except perhaps that our widely-accepted Western notion of 'Two Sizes Fit All' seems increasingly outdated, disenfranchising, and less fun," s/he pondered internally. ↑

2. Whether those are really the same thing is certainly not something I'm prepared to dive into in this blog, let alone this post. ↑

3. This is the real reason for the plexiglass divder at the passport booths. ↑

4. Here we mean the British kind. ↑

Mind your Ps and … X’s?

2014-12-20T17:43:10+00:00

These few letters might trip the learned native English speaker up. Here's how not to incur some Pseudo-Xenophobie.

Ps

We don't need that initial P at all in our $10 English words of Greek origin, do we?

Psilocybin
Pseudo-science
Psoriasis
Psychotherapy

We just ignore that silly P and hiss out the S as if it were the first letter.

Well, Germans don't roll that way. They are principally opposed to slackers, and that applies to letters getting a free ride in words. ¹ This means you've got to pronounce that P. Don't overthink it -- this is a sound you already make effortlessly in English words like

Alps
Capsize
Chopsticks
Cyclops ²
Ellipsis
Gypsies
Tramps
~~Thieves~~ Pimps
Upset

With a little practice, you can make that plosive-sibilant combination from a dead stop. Don't let that P schwarzfahren -- make it board at the front of the bus and earn its Fahrstrecke!

der Psalm
pseudowissenschaftlich
die Psyche

Pf

This is maybe the most common one confronting the foreign speaker:

der Dudelsackpfeifer
die Pfaltz
das Pfand
der Pfau
der Pfingsten
die Pflicht
pflücken
pfropfen ³
der Pfund

The first one is not word-initial, but that consonant pile-up (ckpf) on the compound word split prevents you from taking the easy way out and artificially splitting the syllabary uprights. But that's a great way to go for with these, which you can say with no trouble, can't you?

der Apfel
das Opfer
die Überempfindlichkeit

Your salvation here will be feigning disgust or disbelief. Make a scowly face, swing your head a bit to the side and puff your dissatisfaction non-verbally out between your mostly closed lips. There, you've done it. ⁴

Pt

Also beware Pt, in German words like Ptolemäus and Pterodactylus. The same rules apply as with Ps!

But why do we pronounce the P in our word "helicopter?" Blame the French.

X

X is easy when it's bringing two syllables together. How about at the start of a word? In German, don't pronounce a word-initial X like you would in English (namely, a voiced sibilant).

Xaver
Xylem
Xylophone
Xenomorph
Xenon

Pronounce that word-intial X just as if it were wedged between two syllables...

Alexis
Baxter
Coaxing
Dixieland
Huxley
Toxics ³

... and you'll draw attention to your impressive vocabulary, not any foreign accent:

das Xanthangummi
der Xerxes
die Xerographie
die Xenophobie
(?) Xing

1. Barring a few exceptions. ↑

2. Hmm, do we pronounce that P because it is not word-initial? ↑

3. Ooh, a two-fer ↑

4. ...and effected a very typical German attitude, to boot. ↑

Kann der Mond bumsen?

2014-09-11T04:26:36+00:00

I was taking some meeting minutes with a colleague yesterday. We did the whole meeting German -- it was all native speakers bis auf Yours Truly, so there was no reason not to. But we wanted to record the decisions and action plans in English, since the wider audience is not likely to be just German-speakers. This happens pretty frequently where I work.

I noticed we were using plenty of Denglish (that is also a fact of life in my line of work), and for a distraction at the end of a tiring day I asked about the gender of all those English words we'd employed in the discussion:

die Farm (as opposed to der Bauernhof)
der Level (as opposed to die Ebene or die Schicht)
der View (as opposed to die Sicht or die Maske)
die Mail, because die Nachricht (but some say das Mail)

I got faux ornery ¹ at my colleague. I asked him, accusingly, "so how did the entire German Rasse ² collectively decide which gender to assign to which words you imported from my native language you obviously prefer over perfectly usable equivalent terms in your own Muttersprache?

His answer:

Well, we usually just keep the gender from the original language.

I guffawed. "These are all English words. They don't have a gender at all. You have arbitrarily chosen one for them in your language!"

His response: "Yes, but...wait, does that mean you really don't think of...I don't know, the Moon, as masculine or feminine?"

My retort: "Kann er bumsen?"

His rebuttal: "Nein, aber der Mann im Mond!"

My reply: "Ja, der schon, aber sein Wohnort nicht!"

The Sun and Moon are nice examples, since German flips the gender roles around there, compared to Romance languages. I pontificated thusly: "Our languages are really quite similar, especially considering the differences between, say, Ancient Egyptian and Mandarin. But despite our similarities, there must be something fundamentally different between our two languages if you never considered that we have no deep-down-unexpressable feeling that the inanimate objects have inherently masculine or feminine aspects."

We got into a few edge cases, like das Mädchen, but that's easily explained away to diminuitives. I said "look what you did to that poor girl, taking away her gender completely!" He justified it with das Kind as OK, so maybe das Mädchen is NBD... But der Junge ³ gets to keep his masculine...um, article.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this discussion: I've had it before -- with other native German speakers, talented in English and other European languages.

This opened a whole new Fass: ⁴ how much does gender in one's native language (or the lack thereof) influence our abilities to really understand foreign speakers, or native speakers when we are the foreign speakers?

1. Pronounced fo zorneREE. ↑

2. He cringed, and I admit to delighting in that. ↑

3. Really just an abbreviation of der junge Mann. ↑

4. ein Fass aufmachen = open a can of worms ↑

“Es zieht!”

2014-09-01T02:48:05+00:00

What does, exactly? Get used to this expression around Germans. They, painting with a very broad cultural brush here, are sensitive to moving air, for whatever reason:

They are convinced a current of moving air causes temperature differentials and affects circulation, resulting in (unwanted) stiffness.
They regret having teased that ugly girl who grew up to be a witch and is now likely to shoot them in the back with magic. No, really: there's a German Wikipedia entry about how mysterious, sudden backpain was blamed on black magic.
They think that moving air -- too much or not enough of it -- is the root of all not immediately explainable ailments, particularly the upper-respiratory kind.

If you ask a modern German "What's up with your culturally pervasive notions about moving air?" they tend to respond along the lines of #1 or #3. But, if they are honest with themselves, it's #2 above causing the most concern.

Whatever your stance on moving air ^{<a href="#kidding" id="1"</a>}, ziehen has a rich variety of usages to enchant the non-native speaker of German, particularly when combined with prefixes (some separable, some not, often combined!) to achieve the maximum ratio of meaning-to-root.

"BNSF 5350 20040808 Prairie du Chien WI" by User Slambo on en.wikipedia (same as Slambo here) - Photo by Sean Lamb (Slambo). Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

ziehen

On the face of it, it's just "to pull." It's an irregular verb, and unpredictable in several ways:

it looks pretty respectably regular in the present tense conjugational pattern: ich ziehe, du ziehst, er/sie/es zieht. But its stem-changing past tense pattern involves a whole 'nother consonant: ziehen -- zog -- gezogen Where did that 'g' come from?</p>
sometimes it takes haben and sometimes sein for perfect past formation -- just depends on whether it's transitive or not and whether any motion is toward a goal. ²

Related Forms

Bear in mind that nothing here is meant to represent an exhaustive list of usages. Additional related forms, aspects, and especially pitfalls are entirely welcome -- please post them as comments.

Nouns

Deutsch	English	Examples/Notes
Abzug	reduction, subtraction	especially accounting, but could also be focused ventilation
Anzug	suit	situational clothing, like Badeanzug, Schlafanzug
Atemzug	breath
Aufzug	elevator
Auszug	extract, citation	bank statement
Beziehung	relationship	Not to be confused with Verhältnis, which can also mean relationship, or affair. ³
Bezug	relation, regard	In Bezug auf = "with regard to"; also bezüglich is a convenient adverb. Also, a slipcover for furniture.
Entzug	withdrawal	Not the accounting kind: physiological or emotional.
Erstbezug	first occupancy	According to dict.cc. ⁴
Erziehung	education, rearing, raising	Not to be confused with Ausbildung or Fortbildung.
Verzug	arrears, delinquency	Again with the accounting!
Vollzug	execution, completion, carrying out	See also Strafvollzug
Vorzug	preference	That which you would pull first -- see also bevorzugen.
Umzug	move	change of residence
Zug	train, movement, draft	A literal or figurative manipulation of a pawn is a Schachzug.

See an ancient cousin to our English "tug" lurking in there?

Verbs [Präfix] + ziehen

Mensch. There are tons of these. Here are some of unserer bevorzugten:

Deutsch	English	Examples/Notes
ausziehen	to pull out	See Auszug above.
sich ausziehen	to take off, to undress	If one removes specific articles of clothing, then they are the direct object and one is the indirect object. One must refer to oneself with the dative reflexive pronoun (mir, dir, sich, uns, euch, sich). If you're going full birthday suit ⁵, the reflexive pronoun is the accusative type (mich, dich, sich, uns, euch, sich).
sich beziehen + auf	to refer to	In the abstract sense, similar to "to apply to"; not the act of checking reference materials for guidance.
durch die Häuser ziehen	to do a pub crawl	There may be a connection to the concept of a Zug being a parade, too (think Fasching oder Karneval here).
durchziehen	to pull through, to follow through (with, on)	Germans lead the way ("to pull through"), but English-speakers are pushing from behind ("to follow through")
einbeziehen	to include, imply, implicate	Like beziehen, but conveying more direct motion (yet still abstractly so!) via the prefix ein-
einziehen	intransitively: to move in transitively: to pull in	Taking over a new place of residence? Move in. You're a turtle avoiding a predator? Pull your head in.
entziehen	to withdraw	not in the accounting sense, like to withdraw an offer
erziehen	to raise, to rear	applies to people, but the word for raising livestock, züchten, must be related.
glatt ziehen	to smooth/straighten out?	My boss says this often in place of durchziehen; he means there are many individual instances of something which need standardization.
großziehen	to raise, nurture (a child)	What is the relationship to Großzügigkeit here?
nachvollziehen	to comprehend, to be able to relate to something	Achtung! Neither of those prefixes are separable!
umziehen	to move	as in a change of residence
sich umziehen	to change one's clothes
vorbeiziehen	to pass someone by	Used with an; compare to aneinander vorbei reden to get the sense of the vorbei part.
vorziehen	to prefer	AFAIC this means the same as bevorzugen. Bevorzugen, however is a non-separable and attractively regular verb, so wir bevorzugen bevorzugen. ⁶
wegziehen	to move away	We hear weg- pronounced like "veck," not like "vague" ... is prepositional weg always pronounced that way, versus the substantive Weg?
weiterziehen	to press on	in your journey
zurückziehen	to pull back
zusammenziehen	to move in together
zuziehen	to tighten up (like a loose screw), or to call in an external party	Ever notice that a screwdriver puts the screws in, but a Schraubenzieher pulls them out?

Adjectives and Adverbs

Deutsch	English	Examples/Notes
großzügig	generous	"big movely?" Perhaps "in great strides"?
bezüglich	regarding	abbreviated bzgl.
zuzüglich	not including	abbreviated zzgl. — it means you're going to have to pay extra.
zügig	quickly

There are a lot of expressions involving ziehen, or forms of it. If they have bewildered you in their Vielfältigkeit or their subtlety, well... das kann ich vollkommen nachvollziehen.

1. Who're we kidding? Sorcery. ↑

2. Of course, that's another post entirely. ↑

3. The naughty kind. ↑

4. Is that really its own word in English? ↑

5. I really want *Geburtstagsanzug to exist, but it stubbornly refuses to. ↑

6. Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Huh? ↑

Determined to determine determination: festlegen and feststellen

2014-08-03T06:32:14+00:00

If you work in German, you've probably encountered these words before: festlegen and feststellen. While they both ostensibly translate to "to determine" in English, and they have a lot of other similarities, they definitely have distinct meanings.

Let's start with what they have in common:

First off, they're both transitive and regular. ¹ Transitive means means the verb needs an object. Regular means you can count on them to follow conjugation rules -- in this case, for all persons and tenses. So no need to memorize the quirks of these two verbs -- es gibt keine!
They are both separable-prefix verbs. You know, those ones whose prepositional component kind of breaks off from the rest of verb and waits patiently at the end of the clause ², preventing your conversational partner from jumping in and prematurely interjecting. German Wikipedia has some good examples of separable prefix verbs and their permutations if you need a refresher.
You can nounify them both with -ung, which is great, because then you automatically know their gender. -ung is reknowned for its reliable femininity. ³
And they both can be translated as "to determine." Whoa, Nellie. Hold up there a minute.

To determine doesn't always mean the same thing in English. Learning festlegen and feststellen has even helped me to see that some of its meanings are even contradictory.

feststellen

When you stell something fest, you are putting it firmly in its place, as if it were not a completely known quantity beforehand, but nach der Festellung, both its location and momentum are known. ⁴ So feststellen means "to determine" in the sense of "solve for x."

festlegen

This is another beast completely -- one we have bent to our will in the very moment of performing our Festlegung. Here we are not merely passive observers, trying to make sense of the universe. We are determining our own fate, by actively firming (fest) up our path through space and time.

With a little determination, it's clear that determining festlegen and feststellen's separate meanings are neither rocket science nor quantum physics. And it also sheds a little light on the complexities foreign speakers of English face.

1. These are not unrelated attributes, but that's another post. ↑

2. That is, unless we're talking about subordination, natch. Separable prefixes are afraid of subordinating conjunctions, and meekly reattach to the front of the main verb in subordinate clauses. ↑

3. See what I did there? ↑

4. Tip o' the hat to Werner Heisenberg for the example. ↑