Word of the Day – “der Ton”

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Hello everyone,

and welcome to our German Word of the Day. Do you know what music and your coffee cup have in common?
No? Well, you’ll find out today, because we’ll take a quick look at the meaning of

der Ton

 

I think the musical side isn’t a surprise to most of you, because English, too, has the word tone.
They both come from the Latin word tonus, which itself comes from Ancient Greek tonos and already back then it was used to express the meaning of pitch, voice or musical key. The very origin however was the even more ancient Indo-European root *ten- and that was about… drumroll… stretching.

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Posted on July 8, 2020 by

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Word of the Day – “sparen”

66 comments

Hello everyone,

and welcome to our German Word of the Day. This time, we’ll take a look at something that Germans really love.
Which one of these three do you think it is:

a) Bier
b) making smartass comments and remarks noone asked for
c) sparen

The answer is of course,  that Germans love all these three things equally.
But today, we’ll look at the meaning of

sparen

 

Sparen is the German brother of English to spare and the two do share a core idea, which is pretty well captured by the phrase to not touch.
But the two verbs have different takes on it, and as a result, they’re not really translations. I mean, sometimes they are, but just as often they’re not.
So let’s take a look.

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Posted on June 29, 2020 by

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Word of the Day – “ungefähr”

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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

ungefähr

 

And if you’ve been learning German for a while a part of you might have immediately sounded the prefix alert and been like
“Hmmm… that looks a LOT like gefähr with an un-prefix. So ungefähr just gotta be the opposite of gefähr.”
But is that really what’s going on?
Let’s take a look :).

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Posted on June 20, 2020 by

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Word of the Day – “drücken”

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Hello everyone,

and welcome our German Word of the Day. And this time, we’ll take a thorough look at the meaning of

drücken

 

Actually, this is kind of the second part of our look at “der Druck“.
In the first part, we talked about the core idea of the family and then focused on the verb drucken and its prefix versions.
If you haven’t read it, you can find it here:

Word of the Day – der Druck

Today, we’ll go over the prefix versions of drücken, because there are quite a few that are absolute must haves. I mean… no pressure. But you really NEED those.
So are you ready to jump in?
Perfect….

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Posted on June 12, 2020 by

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