Hello everyone,
And welcome to the second episode of Prefix Verb Shorts.
In each episode, we take one inseparable prefix verb, see what it means and more importantly, WHY it means what it means, so that little by little, we build an intuition for the prefixes themselves.
And today, we will take a look at
verstehen
Now you might be like “Oh, boring. We know that one already.”
And yes, most of you know that verstehen means to understand.
The story here isn’t really what it means but WHY it means that.
What is the ver- doing and what does it have to do stehen.
And once you ask yourself that, you might also start to wonder the same for English.
Like… how the hell do we get from under and standing to the idea of, well, understanding.
Most native speakers aren’t even noticing that this is kind of weird. It’s the type of thing you only start asking once you learn another language and you start noticing things about your own.
There is some logic here though, and it’s not even all that twisted.
Why “understand” means what it means
The under in understand doesn’t carry the idea of below. Instead, it carries the idea of
among
German unter also has this meaning:
- Ein Verräter ist unter uns.
- A traitor is among us.
And the reason under and unter have this double meaning because there actually used to be two similar sounding words that just fused into one over time.
There was the “classic” under in the sense of “below”, and then there was the among–under, which is actually related to inter- and enter.
And that’s the one we see in understand. Taken literally, the verb would be something like “standing among” or “standing amidst” and now just think of a bunch of Germanic tribe chieftains discussing something at a fire.
“I stand with Beowulf and his reform.” one says and walks over to Beowulf’s group and stands among them.
Saying “I understand you.” was a bit like saying “I stand with you and your group.”
And in German, it’s kind of similar.
Why “verstehen” means what it means
In my article about the prefix ver- (I’ll link it up below), we found out that ver- covers four themes.
- away
- change
- mistake
- for
These four are all in fact just variations of one single core idea, but we talk more about that in the article about ver-, so I won’t spoil it here.
But now, considering that stehen means to stand…
Which of the four themes of ver- we just saw would you guess best explains the meaning of verstehen.
The correct answer is 'for'.
If we think of the ver- as for, we can think of verstehen as “to stand for”. And that is kind of similar to the English “stand among” we had earlier. You stand amidst your group, you stand for your cause. And both verbs ended up with the sense of “understanding”.
Back a few hundred years, the verb verstehen indeed still had that sense of literally standing for something, but from more figurative sense of agreeing it shifted toward understanding.
Like… imagine someone gives you an explanation and understanding means you can “get behind that explanation”.
Ha, I feel like the more I talk, the less clear it becomes.
Let me know in the comments if it makes sense, but now let’s move on to examples.
“verstehen” – some examples
In present tense, verstehen is completely regular.
- Ich verstehe nicht, warum du mich nicht verstehst.
- I don’t get why you don’t understand me.
And in the past tense… hey actually, your turn :).
What's the correct ge-form of verstehen?
- Ich habe das nicht ________ .
- I didn't understand that.
The ge-form if "verstanden".
In the sense of understanding, verstehen and understand line up pretty well, but verstehen has a couple of side meanings that English doesn’t share.
The first one is the phrase sich (+Acc) verstehen (mit), which is about getting along with someone.
- Ich verstehe mich gut mit Thomas.
- I get along well with Thomas.
I think the logic is pretty clear. I understand Thomas, Thomas understands me, so we get along well.
And the second side-hustle, so to speak, is sich von selbst verstehen. Taken literally, it’s something like “understand itself without help” and the actual sense is something like “That goes without saying.”
Honestly, the more common way to say this though is selbstverständlich, which can also be a somewhat formal option for of course.
- “Habt ihr veganfreie Sojamilch?”
“Selbstverständlich!“ - “Do you have vegan free soy milk?”
“Of course!“
There are actually quite a few cool related words to verstehen. Most of them are based on the stem verstand and of course they all circle around the idea of understanding.
If you want to check how many you know, try out the flashcards for this lesson below. And if you want to review them along with some examples, you can use the vocabulary overview there.
And then, if you’d rather explore and practice them in context, just use my text comprehension tool to create a text on your level based around verstehen and brothers and sisters.
Or you can just call it a day and let the info settle :)
That’s it for today, as always, if you have any questions or suggestions, just leave me a comment. Same goes for bug reports for the flashcards and vocab and text features. These are brand-new, so there might be littles glitches here and there.
I really hope you enjoyed this one, have an amazing day, and I’ll see you next time.
Audio Speed
Dark Mode
Hello everyone,
hope your studies are going well.
I thought I’d hop in real quick like to thank everyone who paid a little extra to help sponsor others.
I am one of the people who was contacted and let in recently by Emanuel.
Let us do our best together.
Thanks.
Hello,
Some typos:
“have this double meaning because” (have this double meaning is because)
“from more figurative sense of agreeing” (from the more figurative sense of agreeing)
“there might be littles glitches” (there might be little glitches)
Thanks, I love this series :)))
Bis bald!
Not sure by whom but there was an analysis of understanding in the meaning of understanding a concept. “stand” is implying standing and thus pausing, leading to a mental state of understanding. This analysis usually stress the phenomenon that you gotta pause and ponder (stand thus stop) to understand something. You can only understand something if you stop!
The issue is/was indeed lexical, to be sure the distinction between “to stand UNDER” something, whereas in German of course “unterstehen” has a vastly different meaning or lexic than “verstehen”.
Anglophone speakers mired in source language interference struggle with this issue.
That’s all I was trying to say.
A lovely little lesson! Checking out the additional words, then the flashcards and then the comprehension test is a great way to make the information stick.
I still love the little button-quizzes that are interspersed in the explanations – they cause me to slow down and think for a bit – it’s too easy to read quickly and convince myself I’m actually retaining everything.
I really enjoy this as well when writing the article. It makes it more like an actual lesson would be.
Me too!
“Ver-” tends either to show a negative extreme e.g “tun” = to do by performing an action vs. sich VERtun = to make a mistake, a blunder, or, to extend an action such as “stehen” = to stand as opposed to VERstehen, to stand “past” something in the sense of to grasp it in perspective, that is, to comprehend.
English “understand” appears to follow a different root…and a different lexical function while having the meaning of verstehen!
I respect Beowulf and all his greatness, but I’m sticking with Miss Verständnis.
Lol, yeah, good choice. Browulf is fun for game night, but a woman with Verständnis for us is something to cherish.
When I was at university, our Germanistik professor was teaching Beowulf for our course in OE (Old English), later on that semester, moving on to Althochdeutsch.
Not surprisingly, I was able to grasp much of what Walther was writing:-)