Hello everyone, and welcome to our German Word of the Day. This time we will look at the meaning of:
zunehmen. Wintertime. White, glistering flakes slowly floating down, covering all earth with a thin soft layer, that we all want to melt away when spring comes….
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I love your blog!!!!!
Toll, das freut mich :)
In typical conversation, do you tend to use erhöhen or steigern? And when talking about things increasing, is it more common to use zunehmen or steigen?
If I’m in the car and my favorite song starts playing on the radio, how do I say, “Hey man, turn it up!”?
Perhaps “Hey Alter, mach das mal lauter!”?
It really depends on the context. For some things “steigern” is more idiomatic, for others it’s “erhöhen”.
For volume of music it’s definitely “lauter machen”. Your sentence is spot on there.
Frickin’ context.
Yup, context must be under tremendous amounts of pressure with so much stuff depending on it XD
Hi Emmanuel, I write about the English language, and I was writing about the English future and came across your blog, because I thought that German didn’t really have a future tense either. Your blog is such fun and so helpful (for a language nerd like myself), that i started to wander about. Great stuff!
A question about zusagen. Could it be that ‘zu’ and (English) ‘so’ are connected? From the way you describe i, it sounds as if Zusagen means ‘to say so’. My students (I teach advanced English, mostly to speakers of Latin languages) struggle with ‘I think so’ and so on. Is there a link?
Hey man, thanks for the nice feedback! As far as I know, “zu” is related to “to” and this comes from an Indo-European stem that was about “toward”. “So” appears to be related to a reflexive pronoun.
(I’m just paraphrasing what I read on Etymonline.com…https://etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=to). So, no link.
“zusagen” is something in between “to promise” and “to grant”. So only if that is the focus, you could use it as a translation for “to say so” (not sure, what I said in the post. Just wanted to make sure)
I first heard the word “zunehmen” used for the phase of the moon. The equivalent word in English is a funny old word, we say the moon is “waxing” when it’s zunehmen and it’s “waning” when it’s abnehmen.
I can’t think of any other context where “waxing” means increasing. The same verb can be used for the painful removal of body hair (using wax) or polishing a car (with *supposedly* wax-based polish which is actually a stinky petroleum product.) “Waning” on the other hand only means decreasing and it gets used to describe people’s excitement about a trend, as in “their interest in cute kitten videos is waning.”
Great post again, thank you. Soon I will begin practicing the separable verbs instead of just learning about them. Do you have any exercise sheets for separable verbs?
Hah… my first thought was “Oh… it’s called waxing because it comes from convex”. But then I looked it up and it’s related to German “wachsen” (pron: vuxen) which means … “to grow”. The both are related to augment by the way.
As for prefix verbs… no, I don’t really have an exercise for it. So you’ll just have to cold start :).
By the way….I didn’t understand the kitten-example. “To wane” just doesn’t make any sense to me in that context
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loab4A_SqoQ
I’m kittin’ of course :)
It’s true that ‘wax’ is not a common verb in this sense, but you can say “she waxed lyrical’.
Wait, what does that mean? Does that mean that she gets better in writing lyrics?
No, when you say for example, “he’s waxing poetic” or “waxing lyrical” you mean they switched to a poetic (perhaps overly-poetic) mood due to some sort of overpowering stimulus. It can be seen as weakness or juvenile, somehow, so sometimes people will apologize for it. Like in the middle of conversation, say in “forgive me for waxing poetic, but I’m looking at this waxing moon (ha) and thinking about its mournful face, all the tragedy it sees over millenia, resting its eyes only once a month, watching humanity’s fitful sleep in countless war zones, lovingly bathing them in pure cool light, as it swings around the earth in an eternal waltz of loneliness.”
Wow, cool. Now I’ll patiently wait and then the day, the moment will come where I can use this waxing. I’ll be super casual about it. And then I’ll be all understatement like “Oh… what… I didn’t even notice I said that”. Can’t wait :D
Hallo,
Können Sie aufnehmen erklären?
Ja, ich mach’s auf die Liste..
Hi,
from the last example: “ich habe nicht vor zuzunehmen” can we conclude that:
“vorhaben zu” means “intend to” ??
exactly… you can find more on “vorhaben” in the article about “haben” and the prefixes…
Hey, dude!
I was readin this article and a doubt arose: Is abnehmen used as antonym of zunehmen only when related to weight or in the previous exampes you gave too?
For instantece: ‘Die Durchschnittstemperatur der Erde nimmt ab.’
Thanks!
Gute Frage! Yes it is … the example is correct (from a language point of view) and I can’t think of a use where abnehmen wouldn’t be the opposite. BUT zunehmen is NOT always the opposite of abnehmen.
– Ich nehme meiner Hut ab.
– Ich nehme den Hörer ab.
– Ich nehme dir das nicht ab.
All those wouldn’t make any sense with zunehmen and it would not be clear what you are trying to say :)
“By the way, to gain weight seems like a really nice phrasing when you think of it… it just sounds all positive :).”
that might explain some of the body-types that we see around here in the States…
Haha yeah maybe… and the opposite sounds so negative:
I lost my phone, my job and 10 pounds.
Ach I see! (how to express it in deutsch again?) man, I really need to broaden my vocab first.. thanks 4 the explanation :)
I’m sorry, made a fatal typo, it was the ‘role’ not ‘rule’ duh! my bad :)
Hi, I kinda confused with the last example you’ve posted, the ‘ich habe nicht vor zuzunehmen’ what is the rule of the zu in front of the zunehmen in here? coz in the other post, you said that zu is not applicable when the verb is a modalverb, correct me if I’m wrong, but the verb here is ‘haben’ right? that is a modalverb, no? danke! :)
ok so “haben” is not a modal but an auxiliary verb but here the actual verb is “vorhaben” and not “haben”… vorhaben is a regular verb just like einkaufen so the zu-rules apply there :)
Your explanation of “zu” to mean “closed” (as in “zumachen”) initially confused me because I have just learnt the word “zuschalten”, which means “to switch on” (and not “to switch off”).
Perhaps “zuschalten” makes the circuit “closed”, which then brings the light “on”?
Oh no, the zu in zuschalten is short for dazu schalten or hinzuschalten. If you translate schalten as switch then zuschalten means to switch something to something else… for instance you have an electric generator but the power it delivers is not enough you might zuschalten your second generator.
You cannot just zuschalten one thing if there is nothing it is added to. So the zu here has nothing to do with closed, it is the local zu as in “Ich gehe zu meiner Mutter”… but yeah… these words are really confusing… by the way… the translation Leo offers really doesn’t get the essence
I’m very impressed with your use of “glister”. Every native speaker whom I know (and I include myself) would simply use “glisten”. This is the first use of the word I have encountered outside of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (“All that glisters is not gold..”). Bravo.
well thank you and thank you dictionary (Leo.org) … it said “glister” was “archaic” so that’s why I picked it :)… and also the German word is “glitzern”, so the -er ending feels genuine to me… anyway, this is a good example of how language evolves.
Edit: a Google ngramm-search suggests that glisten has been the more frequently used word for a while now
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=glister%2Cglisten&year_start=1600&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
Good article.
I believe you have made a mistake that should not be ignored. You should write ‘lose’ instead of ‘loose’.
Oh man, thanks a billion!!! I have mistyped this my whole life and I never realized that there is 2 different words :)