Word of the Day – “erledigen”

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Hello everyone,

and welcome to our German word of the Day. This time with yet another one of those words that are quite common in everyday German, that somehow get overlooked by textbooks. Ladies and gentlemen… get ready for a look at the meaning of

erledigen

 

And because erledigen isn’t only really useful itself but also has quite an interesting family, we’ll start thousands and thousands of years ago, with the hyper ancient, allegedly incredibly good looking Indo-Europeans.
More specifically, with the Indo-European language root *el.

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Posted on October 18, 2019 by

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Word of the Day – “das Lob”

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Hello everyone,

and welcome to our German Word of the Day. This time with a quick look at the meaning of

das Lov

 

oh… ups…  I meant

das Lob

 

Sorry for the typo, haha.
So yeah, we’ll look at das Lob today, not only because it’s something that everybody likes to get, but also because there are a few related words that seem to have as much connection to das Lob as I have to the WIFI in the library.
NONE!!
If you listen to this, dear library… your WIFI is really really not good.
And that by the way was kind of the opposite of a Lob…

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Posted on October 10, 2019 by

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Word of the Day – “gelingen”

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Hello everyone,

and welcome to our German Word of the Day. And today, we’ll take a look at the meaning of

gelingen

 

Gelingen is one of those weird words many of you have probably missed for some reason, even though it is quite useful and common.
And it’s one of those verbs that have ge- as an actual non-separable prefix, not just a past marker.
And if you’re now like
“We DO NOT know what you’re talking about, Emanuel, this is advanced stuff….”
let me tell you that you, all of you, know at least one other example for these kinds of verbs… gefallen :). 
The two actually kind of fit together, both grammatically and thematically… something that mir gelingen will probably dir gefallen.
But I’m getting ahead of myself …

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Posted on October 3, 2019 by

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Word of the Day – “spalten”

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Hello everyone,

and welcome to our German Word of the Day. And today we’ll take a look at the meaning of

spalten

 

And man… what a sound! And maybe that’ just me, but it matches really well with what it stands for. Spalten!
Like… a chasm opening up during an earthquake. Or a bolt of lightning smashing into a tree.
Well okay,  I guess technically those would sound more like “cshrrrkh”. But at least to me, spalten fits well, too. And this notion of forcefully splitting in two is kind of the core of spalten. And not only that verb. It actually was also the core of the Indo-European root *(s)pel-.
Which is uber ancient, btw… just in case you were wondering.
And you’ll be surprised how many words come from it.
But more on that later. Let’s start with spalten itself….

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Posted on September 25, 2019 by

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