Hello everyone,
this week I’m having a guest on here :).
Her name is Slavica, and a while back, she reached out to me about something relating to her final paper in linguistics.
She has since graduated, but she obviously didn’t stop studying and being fascinated by languages. And not so long ago she reached out again and asked if I was interested in a guest post.
Usually, when people ask if one is interested in guest posts it’s because they want to place text links to their own websites in there. And the posts are usually super generic and boring, because the author doesn’t really care about the material. That’s why I don’t usually take guest posts.
But with Slavica it’s different. She REALLY loves languages and she just wanted to share her passion with you, not a link.
That’s why I have decided to give it a try.
Also… I have done quite a bit of work behind the scenes these past weeks. Specifically, I am giving old articles a much needed do over… I just got done editing the one about “sondern” and I have to say… that was a mess. Like… what was I even thinking :D. It’s MUCH better now.
Anyway, so … the topic Slavica is going to talk about is
Collocations in German
And if you’re now like “Cool… uh… collo-what?” then you’re just like me.
I didn’t know what it was either. But we all use them literally everyday.
So… Slavica, I pass the mic on to you…
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What a great article! I’ve run across the phrase “ganz schon” (mit umlaut) several times lately eg ganz schon sauer. Does that qualify? And does it translate to “really” or “very”?
Yeah, that would be a collocation because it’s a unit and does not just mean “completely beautiful”.
I would translate it as “quite” or “pretty”. “really” and “very” feel one notch too intense for me, but that might just be my perception of the English words.
Collocation Resource. There is an extensive paper on German Collocations at “archive.org” called “The German Word Collocations Guide”. It is 72 pages and its author has granted free distribution. I have been studying German grammar for a while and when taking a sentence example from my lesson and expanding it by substituting different nouns, verbs, etc. I am often lost when I look up a noun, in the dictionary, and there are many German words for one English word. While my new sentence may be grammatically correct, it may be very different from what I am trying to say. German idioms or collocations are part of the answer. Only problem is, there are thousands.
I found this which is basically just a list of collocations and doesn’t detail the meanings or contexts when it would be used, but is a good start at least, especially if you already have a vague idea what you want to say and are using this as a supplement:
https://kollokationenwoerterbuch.ch/web/
Nice find!!
Me personally, I’m not a big fan of learning collocations, as it seems to take a lot of energy in which I could just learn more vocabulary, but it’s definitely a great way to collect new words and check if something is idiomatic or not.
Hallo
Are there any websites for collocations you would recommend? I couldnt find anything!
Unfortunately not!
But there MUST be sources for this for learners. It’s not a niche topic at all, and often comes up in language classes.
Letzter Zeit hatte ich eine ähnliche Erfahrung wie du mit der “Lichtbirne”. Ich war im Supermarkt und habe nach “Pflanzenerde” gefragt. Ich merkte, dass der Mitarbeiter für eine halbe Sekunde verwirrt aussah. Dann wusste er was ich meinte und fragte, “Sie wollen Blumenerde kaufen?” Von nun an werde ich die richtige Wortverbindung im Kopf haben. Obwohl ich mit der Erde eigentlich Gemüse anbaue…. :-)
Ha, schöne Geschichte. Aber Pflanzenerde gibt es eigentlich als Wort auch. Und dann noch “Pflanzerde” :D
Thanks a lot for this topic. I’ve been learning German for a couple of months now. When I was preparing for IELTS exam, my English teacher introduced me to “Oxford Collocation App”. I use it on a daily basis and it is really helpful. I was wondering if German has a similar app or website focused on collocations? Or should I simply use “Duden Dictionary” and read its examples?
Dieser Artikel hat mir sehr gefallen – thank you for taking the chance on the Gast-Artikel! In my native English, I definitely overlook how many of these I use every day. I’m also starting to learn Chinese.. so, I don’t know what the term is in character-symbolic languages, but there definitely is something similar even on an individual noun level. 灯泡 means light-bulb, and literally is the characters for “light” and “bubble” put together. But it’s not too helpful to call it a light bubble, but rather learn it as it is for ‘lightbulb’. And ‘bubble’ itself is a combination of the ‘water’ radical and the word for ‘package’ – like a package of air wrapped in water.
Wow, now I want to learn Chinese :). This script sounds so intresting and poetic. “bubble – water as a package”… thanks for sharing that!
Side note: the first character kind of looks like the hangman drawing :D
I am a writer (novels) and LOVE collocations (though I’d never heard of this word before), because they are a part of what give writing “a voice”. How words are combined varies somewhat in English from state to state, also affected by social class, education, age, background and upbringing. People in different professions use different phrases and word combinations. Sure, we have standard ways of saying things, but teens in inner city Seattle do not sound like the elderly in rural Vermont (and it isn’t just a matter of slang…). I’m certain that this is true in Germany, too. I read (with much effort and very very slowly) German novels, and greatly look forward to the day that I can hear “the voice” in the writing. Right now I take all collocations and word choices as standard and don’t have enough experience to say, “This person sounds… (young, elderly, uptight, laid back, Southern, from the coast, from the mountains etc…)”.
So, thank you Slavica! This was very interesting to me, and loads of fun. And perhaps it will help me to hear “the voice” in a German novel some day.
That’s really interesting!
I’m wondering… do you have lists of collocations for different kinds of characters somewhere in your desk? Or is it all stored in your head? I mean, of course a lot is your own feeling for the language, but I wonder if you made up an “external storage” too :).
Right now I am writing historical fiction, so I read very widely in the 19th century (novels, speeches, medical texts, engineering books, naval journals, sermons, autobiographies…). As I read, I take notes, writing down words and turns of phrase that are distinctive. Pages and pages of notes, that I then staple together and give a heading to, depending on the character I want to ascribe them to. When I write, I refer back to them, reading them over and playing with the phrases to make them come alive for a particular personality. It’s really really fun. I can’t express how much fun it is! (Almost as much fun as the wiles and tricks of German grammar?). Thanks for asking!
Wow, that sounds sooo crafty :), if you know what I mean. You get to really really carve out a character by just micromanaging the way the talk. That’s awesome.
Hey Lisa, you are right and you have touched upon a very interesting and broad issue. Language in general, not only collocations, varies greatly from community to community (geographically and temporally). Some elements and “inventions” have such a large impact, that they “cross over” or even become entrenched in standard language (Take the word “selfie” for example). And you are absolutely doing the right thing by considering this in your writing.
Thanks for your comment and best wishes to you
Thanks!
vielen Dank to you!!
Good English collocation dictionaries exist and they help learners a lot, especially when it comes to writing essays. Here is one example: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/collocations/condition
I wonder if one exists for German?
I also invest a bit of money in context search app such as Reverso. When you look up a phrase, for example “pass an exam”, it looks for common occurrences from online or its own literature sources, and return top sentences that suggest you use “Prufung bestehen”. The sources are translated (e.g. EU documents) and the app has an algorithm to learn which phrases match up in any pairs of languages. Because it uses close-to-native sources, it captures collocations even the ones not recorded in dictionary entries. The problem with German though is that it has too many word orders, conjugations, and case rules, so it hasn’t worked as well as french and English in my experience.
There’s Dwds.de which has a tab that shows which words a word often goes together with. But it’s not as cool as the Oxford thing you mentioned!
Reverso is helpful and reliable. I use it very often. dwds is a very rich source and you get so much out of it. there is also Leo. Leo is awsome (leo.org). And you are absolutely right, german morphosyntax makes learner’s lives a bit harder.
good luck to you.
No typos but still some incorrect phrasing (e.g. “much far”, “unaware how weird”). It’s hard to be perfect.
Personally I found the topic interesting but the article a little useless, and the constant assumptions about everyone’s background and way of learning and thinking rather irritating. I still appreciate the effort of someone writing an article to help others learn, but I much much prefer your articles! (With crazy analogies, mnemotechnics and etymological (yep, made up, aware) backtracking rather than “that’s how it is”, “learn it by heart”…)
In Slavica’s defense I have to say that I think she was more quoting research about learning theory than making assumptions about how we learn.
The problem with collocations is really that “You have to learn them/get a feel for them” is the only option oftentimes. That’s why me personally, I have subconsciously avoided this topic for years :D.
Anyway, thanks for your feedback!
Loved it! Although I already knew about collocations, it´s such a useful topic in foreign language learning that I guess it can never get too much of it:-). Vielen Dank!
Ich bin züruck (ich hoffe) und zurzeit versuche ich,Sie zu ärgern (Viele Kommentaren auf alten und neuen Post. Vellicheht oder Vielleicht auch nicht ;). Sagen Sie mir Nur Ihre Zeitplan. Eh, los geht.
Notiz : ”alten,, hier bedeutet ,,ich habe schon Kommentaren geschrieben”
Ist das so gut wie “Machen”
“Darf ich ein foto aufnehmen?”
Ich habe gehört, dass das verb “Machen” Sich nicht gut anhöre,deshalb Verwende man es als letztes Mittel. Der Grund war, dass es kindisch war und verwandt mit Kacka (Kindersprache)
Bisepeile
Erfahrung Bekommen/sammeln statt machen
Brot Backen Statt Machen
Was denken Sie?
Ich Weiß, dass Kollokationen sehr wichtig sind
ich weiß
ein Vermögen erwerben, eine Wahl treffen,Vertrauen aufbauen und für etw. spät dran sein
Jetzt Habe ich 2 Fargen (Verwandt und Nicht Verwandt)
1) Wie war das
War das sprachüblich/Idiomatisch? ( Alle Text)
Könnten Sie bitte mir bewerten?
?/10
2) Gibts es einen Unterschied zweichen zugutekommen und Profitieren? Kontext?
3) Wo kann ich mehr lernen
I’ll answer your questions first:
1) it was okay, but you’ve done better on formatting in older comments ;)
2) The main difference is grammar:
– Ich profitiere von etwas.
– Etwas kommt mir zugute.
Also the vibe is different. Zugute sounds less “profit”-oriented.
3) Worüber?
Now for you collocations:
Brot backen and Erfahrung sammeln are idiomatic, and Foto aufnehmen is okay. But “Foto machen” is way more idiomatic. I know that “machen” can sound kind of basic, but trying to avoid it can easily sound unnatural an stilted.
Thank you for the answer
1) thank you for the feedback but I was more asking with regards to whether my use was Idiomatic
2) by “Profit” orientated, you mean I am more likely to hear “Profitierien” in a context of Financial earnings and so
3) Collocations. Other than reading and listening of course. Like a Spesfic Book or a website.
With regards to your point about Machen, I did not mean to entirely avoid. I am pretty sure there are phrasing where you cannot avoid it. What I am meant is when there is another natural alternative, go for it.
1) Well, it’s wasn’t perfect, but it was understandable.
2) Yes, but it’s not limited to that.
3) There are two books being mentioned in the comments here. I don’t remember the titles right now, otherwise I would tell you.
As for machen… if the alternative is as natural as machen, then yes.
I forgot to say that I found the article really useful. Thank you Emanuel and Slavica.
I had heard of collocations, thanks to a useful book of vocabulary exercices called ‘Da fehlen mir die Worte’. It has a long chapter on colocations with lots of exercices, as well as others on synonyms, homonyms word families etc.
Perfect book title fo a vocab oriented book :). Thanks for the suggestion!
Lots to think about in this article. Thanks for including it.
“Glow pears” cracked me up – have been studying and speaking German for 30 years and I still have the “glowing pear” image in my head every time I say it in German ! Glad I am not alone !
Great article !
My German teacher has just come back from Germany. She told us she was several times pulled up with ‘ ah we know what you mean but we would no longer say it like that’. Thank you Slavica for a really interesting post.
Your comment made me think that this must actually be kind of sad… this feeling of slowly losing touch with your mothertongue :).
Hallo,
Auf Englisch, sagt man nicht “wouldn’t get much far.” Sie wissen genau aber der Unterschied ist wie “viel” und “sehr” klein. . . wir verstehen ubrigens, was Sie gemeint haben. Man kann “much further” sagen, wenn nicht weitergehen kann. Ach, ich bin muede und fahrt not much further. Kennen Sie “macaronic”?
Sport treiben – Sport machen. Es ist mir egal. Ich schwimme.
And I liked this article a lot!
Schwimmen ist auch Sport :)