Knowing relations between words can help understand their meanings and build a more connected vocabulary network. Here, you can explore parents and offspring and discover the whole family.
- shows how many children or parents the word has
- get the translations and a link
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Sources for Etymology:
- Check "der-weg" on DWDS.de
Biggest German Dictionary, great for etymology, usage frequency and collocations) - "der-weg" on Wiktionary (English version)
(For etymological connections across European languages. Not always accurate) - Etymonline.com - Origins of English words
My favorite source for the origin of English words.
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Does it sound idiomatic to use “machen” when you a talking about walking a specific route in a very literal sense? I’ve seen it used in a more metaphorical way before.
How does this sound “ich hätte gerne den Gr20-Wanderweg auf Korsika machen” ?
Sounds perfect!
Well, except it should be “… hätte gerne…. gemacht” or “würde gerne…. machen” depending on what you mean.
But yeah, this is how people express that stuff.
You can also say “wandern” for a hike like that or “laufen”, but “gehen” for instance sounds weird.
Well, except it should be “… hätte gerne…. gemacht” or “würde gerne…. machen”
True! Thanks for pointing this out.
Weg vs Art when we are talking about “The Way” in the metaphorical sense, confuses me a bit when I think too much about it. I never had a problem with it, until I did a B2.3 course where multiple people used “Weg” where I would’ve used “Art” in numerous occasions. At one point I felt they are just mistranslating from english but I’m starting to question my own knowledge.
My first thought was that, if we are talking about a metaphorical way that still signals a path of some sort, then you use “Weg” like “Der Weg zum Erfolg ist hart” but if you want to say “There are multiple ways to solve this problem” then here I’d use “Art” so “Es gibt viele Arte, dieses Problem zu lösen” (sidenote: “Möglichkeiten” would maybe fit better here or that’s at least what DeepL uses, but I’m trying to illustrate a point). Similar examples to this second one are where some of the people in the course used “Weg”.
Am I making any sense with that?
It’s a touch question!
To me, “Weg” and “Art” are not very similar, but thinking about your question made me realize how they indeed are hard to tell apart if you can’t feel it, because you’d use mcuh of the same vocabulary.
Generally, the “Weg” is the path you can take to get to a destination. And the “Art” is how you walk on that path, if you will. Both answer to “how”, but their focus is different.
– Die Art zum Erfolg.
This makes zero sense, because “Art” cannot be connected with a destination like that.
– mehrere Wege, das Problem zu lösen.
I would prefer “Wege”, but “Arten” sounds fine too. So they’re more or less synonymous here.
Does that help a bit?
Yes it does, thank you. I think I got a bit too caught up with the English translations to be honest. Being a greek Muttersprachler myself, the problem mostly goes away by assigning a corresponding Greek word to “Art” and “Weg”. Since I’m taking the courses in Germany, I tend to compare German more with English even though a lot of the time the Greek would make more sense.