Hello everyone,
and welcome to our German Word of the Day. This time, we’ll take a closer look at
fühlen
It’s not a big reveal that fühlen is to feel.
The problem is that you can’t just translate them one to one and mistakes with fühlen are actually super common. I mean, in a grammatical sense.
Here’s the thing: there are three somewhat distinct uses for the English to feel. The first one is talking about what we feel (perceiving something), then there’s the one about how we feel (perceiving ourselves) and last but not least the one that’s about how something feels (something is perceived).
Here’s an example for each one:
- I feel an itch.
- I feel happy.
- The towel feels soft.
Now, why are we making these three groups? Well, because they are different. At least different enough for German to be like “Oh, oh, oh, hooooold up. I soooooo need three different verbs here.”
People all around the globe were like “What the hell man?”.
God and all the Gods were like “What the hell, man?!”.
“What the hell, ‘man?” howled the wind
“What the hell, ‘man?” growled the bear.
“What the hell, ‘man?” sang the birds, high up in the air.
And finally German sighed and said
“Fine. I’ll try, I’ll try it with one. But I need three structures, a prefix and a reflexive to get it done.”
And that’s the mess we’ll look at today,
so follow me. I know the way.
“Uh… will that all be in rhymes now, Emanuel?”
Nah, don’t worry. Just old fashioned ‘splaining.
