Word of the Day – “fangen”

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Hello everyone,

and welcome to our German word of the Day. Today, we’ll take a look at

fangen

 

And that of course includes all its prefix versions, one of which is anfangen, which means to begin, which is kind of a weird meaning once you know that fangen means to catch, which is easy to remember if you mentally connect it to fangs, which are these long pointy teeth of an animal that they use to catch prey.
My writing in 2020, ladies and gentlemen. #bad #poor. I hope you like it.
Anyway, let’s jump right in.

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Posted on April 3, 2020 by

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“anyway” in German – The Exercise

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Hello everyone,

a little faster than usual, but many of us have to spend a lot of time at home, so I hurried a bit with the new post:).
A few days ago, we learned about the different ways to say

anyway in German

And today, it’s time for a little practice.
If you haven’t read the post or if you want to read it again, you can find it here.

How to say “anyway” in German

But I’ll give you a quick recap here, as well. And actually, I have to make some additions, because I completely forgot to mention a couple of distinct uses of anyway. So it’s actually five now, not three.
Or like the newpaper headline would be these days:

“Use cases of Anywayrus surge by almost 100%!”

Learners increasingly worried as use cases of the English Anywayrus double within just a few days,
bringing the total up to 5.

What a crazy spring.
But we’ll get through this, and we can come out with much better German, so let’s jump right in.

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Posted on March 26, 2020 by

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Word of the Day – “anyway”

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Hello everyone,

and welcome to our Word of the Day. And this time, it’s actually a pretty special episode because instead of taking a German word and explaining it, we’ll take an English word and look at how to translate it properly.
The reason I haven’t done this kind of articles yet is that not all of you are native English speakers and I wanted to keep the focus on German and use English only as a means to an end.
But hey, it’s 2020 and I just felt like doing it.
So, today we’ll talk about the translation of:

anyway

And not only because it is a really common and useful word, but also because looking at this can help us understand the differences between a bunch of German words learners are slightly confused about.
So are you ready to jump in?
Perfect.

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Posted on March 20, 2020 by

Words of the Day – “von … aus”

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Hello everyone,

and welcome to our German Word of the Day. And today, it’s actually two words because we’ll take a look at the meaning of the combination

von… aus

 

The idea for this came when someone recently asked a comment about the phrase “von Natur aus” and why there was an aus in there.
At first, I was gonna use answer 3b from the “Lazy German teachers’ Handbook” …

“I can’t explain that. It’s a fixed phrase and you have to learn it.”

… but then I realized that it’s actually kind of a useful phrasing that can even get you laid, or a raise if you say it in the right moment.
So let’s take a look.

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Posted on March 7, 2020 by