Hello everyone,
and welcome to a new episode of German Prepositions Explained.
In each episode, we take one German preposition and look at what its core ideas are, how these show up in the use as a prefix, and we’ll go over the most important fixed combinations where a verb always wants this one specific preposition and we’ll see if there’s any logic to it.
Sounds dry?
Well, “sand” also sounds dry but people eat it anyway.
“Emanuel, I don’t think people eat sa….”
Oh, yeah?! Ever heard of this thing called … erm… mette… uh… matterfour!
“It’s called metaphor, Emanuel.”
Ugh whatever, you knew what I mean, right. But thank you!
Anyway, the preposition we’ll look at today is
ab
So if you’re ready to jump in, then let’s goooo.
The family of “ab”
The origin of ab is the provocatively ancient Indo-European root *apo-, which the core idea of:
away, off
This root is also the origin of English of and off, but there are actually quite a few other surprising relatives.
Like after for example, which used to be a “comparative” form of aft with a core theme of “away to the rear”.
Or the Greek based apocalypse which is the old apo- combined with a Greek word for cover.
So the original sense was about “taking off a cover” and for a long time simply meant revelation rather than the modern doomer meaning.
Or how about awkward, which originally meant something like “off-turned, turned the wrong way”.
Or ebb, which comes from the simple idea that the water is “away”.
And let’s also mention apology, which is the old apo combined with the Greek logos, which meant speech, reasoning. An apology was originally kind of a “counter speech”, something you say to make something someone else said go away.
But yeah, the most important offspring are definitely of and off in English and ab in German. And while they are all brothers, they’re actually not really translations. At least not without some cavities that would make a dentist look twice.
“Hey uhm… I think you mean caveats, Emanuel.”
Oh… right.. thanks. Caveats. The dentist joke doesn’t work then, I guess.
“That didn’t work anyway.”
Oh… okay. Well I was trying, at least.
So, one big caveat is that off has added this idea of “not active“. It makes sense if you think of it as very abstract “not present/away”, but generally, the German word for that is aus, not ab, bar the occasional exception of course.
- My phone was off.
- Mein Telefon war aus.
And the other one, of, has taken on this notion of possession or belonging.
I’m not entirely sure how that happened, but either way, the German counterpart for that is von, not ab.
- That’s the phone of my sister.
- Das ist das Telefon von meiner Schwester.
And even if we’re not talking about these contexts, there’s still no guarantee that ab is a translation for of or off.
As with all prepositions, I think it’s the better approach to understand the core idea(s) of a German preposition and then just pick the English counterparts based on that.
The core idea of “ab”
So what is the core idea of ab?
Well, there’s actually two, and I think the first one is best captured as:
separation
And it does mean that as a standalone.
- Du siehst anders aus… ah, dein Bart ist ab.
- You look different… ah, your beard is gone/away/off.
This sense is pretty much in line with the idea of away that was the core of the family, but choosing separation over away, because ab is not merely about something not being there, but rather of the moment of “parting”. And this will be quite important because as usual, German goes all free-jazz with the theme like it’s Sun Ra or something.
Anyway, so separation is the first theme of ab, and the second theme is best captured by:
downward
In fact, the German word for downward is abwärts and ab is often (not always) the counter to auf in the sense of upward.
- “Wie läuft’s in der Beziehung?”
“Es ist ein auf und ab.” - “How are things in the relationship?”
“It’s an up and down thing.” - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Does that somehow tie in with the first sense?
Well, we could think of it as “separation from the top” but technically the same logic would hold for the opposite direction (separation from the bottom).
Maybe it’s because of gravity. Like, things that are “attached” somewhere, usually move downward when you “cut them off”. Like… an apple will fall down if you separate it from the tree.
If that makes sense to you, then great, but I think it’s overall more helpful to think of it as a separate theme, and that’s what I’ll do for the rest of this article.
So yeah, these are the two themes of ab:
- separation
- downward
Now it’s time to see how these show up in practice. And while we’d usually start with the use as regular preposition, today, I’ll actually start with ab- as a verb prefix.
Because there, we can really see how the two core ideas are used and that’ll help us a great deal with the use as a preposition.
So yeah… let’s get it.
“ab” as a prefix
Many prefixes in German have two core themes, and usually, both are somewhat equally common. But ab- is pretty much dominated by one of the themes – the idea of separation, away.
Sure, there are SOME verbs that are built on the idea of downward. absenken for instance, which is about (slowly) lowering something, though senken alone is pretty much the same. Or abseilen which is about lowering by rope, rappelling down.
But most of the verbs that have the notion of downward in them ALSO have the other notion of separation, away, and it’s arguably the more relevant one.
abstellen is a good example for that, in its sense of putting down something that you’re carrying.
- Können wir den Bierkasten kurz abstellen? Meine Arme tun weh.
- Can we put down the case of beer for a second? My arms hurt.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Yes, we’re putting the case “down”, but the focus is arguably more on “separating” from it for a bit.
Similar thing for abnehmen which can be about taking off – in the sense of taking something “away” from somewhere. Be it taking off your hat, or a heavy bag your friend is carrying. Or taking a few kilograms off of your body.
- Ich nehme meine Mütze ab.
- I take off my hat.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Das sieht schwer aus, soll ich dir was abnehmen?
- That looks heavy, should I take some/help you carry?
(also works for figurative loads)
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Thomas hat 4 Kilo abgenommen.
- Thomas has lost 4 kilograms.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
The first example looks like the verb could be about “downward” but in the other examples you can see that really the “away” is what matters.
So yeah, that’s the idea of separating, away is really at the core of most prefix verbs with ab-.
Which is good, because it means less untangling to do for us.
But of course this idea comes in various shades and with various levels of “abstract”.
For the bulk of ab-verbs, the core theme of separation is pretty visible.
Sometimes it’s more about taking away, removing…
- Ich mache den Aufkleber von der Tür ab.
- I remove the sticker from the door.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Marias Präsentation war wieder der Hammer. Da könnt ihr euch alle eine Scheibe abschneiden. (common idiom)
- Maria’s presentation was again absolutely amazing. You can all take an example there.
(“cut yourself one slice off“) - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Ich habe keine Lust abzuwaschen.
- I don’t feel like doing the dishes.
(lit. “washing (the dirt) off”) - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
And sometimes it’s more about going away …
- Wir sind vom Thema abgekommen.
- We veered off topic.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Das Flugzeug hebt ab.
- The planes lifts/takes off.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Ich glaube, der Abfluss ist verstopft. Das Wasser läuft nicht richtig ab.
- I think the drain is clogged. The water doesn’t run away/drain properly.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
There are many more and as you can see it’s quite the range of contexts – but I think the core idea shines strong.
Now let’s gradually turn up the “twist” and see what happens :).
“ab-prefix” – turning up the twist
abgeben for instance can mean to give someone a share.
- Ich gebe dir was von meiner Pizza ab.
- I’ll give you a bit of my pizza.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Doesn’t really seem to fit in with away, separation on first glance, but if you think of it as cutting off a slice of the pizza, then it fits right in.
And once we’ve made sense of abgeben, we can also make sense of abkriegen in its sense of to be hit.
Sounds weird right, but abkriegen is simply the other side of abgeben – it’s the getting a share. Which can be of course a “desired” share, like a slice of pizza. But the thing is… it can also be getting an “unwanted” share – like a bit of vomit on your shoulder.
- “Das Kind im Flugzeug neben mir hat gekotzt.”
“Hast du was abgekriegt?” - “The kid next to me on the plane threw up.”
“Were you hit?” - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Another nice one with a twist is ablehnen. Literally, it would be “to lean off/away” but it’s actual meaning is to turn down (an offer). Like… you kind of “lean the offer away from you”, if you will.
- Ich lehne das Angebot ab.
- I turn down the offer.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
And let’s also mention abholen here. Its translation is to pick up in the sense of going somewhere specifically to pick something or someone up, and the “logic” here is that you kind of go to place and then “fetch” (holen) the thing or person “away” from there.
- Ich hol’ dich morgen von der Arbeit ab.
- I’ll pick you up from work tomorrow.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Mist, ich habe mein Paket nicht abgeholt und jetzt wurde es zurückgeschickt.
- Crap, I didn’t go to pick up my parcel and now it got sent back.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
So these were some examples for verbs that are not immediately obvious but we can still see the core theme if we squint a little.
But of course ab- wouldn’t be a real prefix if there weren’t also some REALLY abstract takes on it.
And that’s what we’ll look at in part two of this article.
I know, I know, some of you are disappointed now, but for the majority of people, this was already enough to digest in one go, and there’s quite a bit more to come because we also have to look at ab as a preposition.
So yeah, let’s wrap this up for the day and continue next time with a fresh mind.
As usual, if you want to check how much you remember of the article, just take the little quiz I have prepared for you.
And of course if you have any questions or suggestions, just leave me a comment.
I hope you liked it and I’ll see you next week. Bye :)
Test Yourself on the prefix “ab”
Oh, by the way, if you want to read some more… I have talked about some of the most important ab-verbs in detail. In these articles, we go over ALL the meanings that they have and see how they connect to each other:
- Prefix Verbs Explained – abgehen
- Prefix Verbs Explained – abheben
- Prefix Verbs Explained -abhängen
- Prefix Verbs Explained – ablaufen
- Prefix Verbs Explained – absehen
- Prefix Verbs Explained – absetzen
And you can find plenty more with brief overviews in my dictionary :)
What about entfernen as a translation for “to remove”? When would you use this verb instead of abmachen?
“abmachen” in the sense of removing is somewhat limited to “taking off”. Something that is attached physically in some way. Like a picture on a wall or some little extension on your clothes.
“entfernen” sounds formal and has a vibe of “cleaning”.
I can’t see “separation” aspect in “abkriegen.” Obvious in “abgeben” but not the other. Can you explain further?
You get a share off of something.
The “kriegen” is about it landing at you but the “ab-” makes it clear that it was a part of something that got “split off” in some way.
Does that help?
For the example:
How do you say the drain has been cleared/unclogged?
The most common way is to say “den Abfluss frei machen”.
And so the Abfluss “ist frei”.
The stuff you do it with (the chemical) is sometimes referred to as “Abflussfrei”.
I see the microphone, I click it, it changes colour, I dictate my best effort, I click the mic again to turn it off …
but how do I make it playback and give me a score? What to press?
(Firefox, Windows 11, Lenovo PC)
It’s fixed :)
I have the same issue. I’ll check it out!
Hi Emanuel,
Even when I haven’t looked at your website for several months I still receive the message below when I click on the link that you send in your newsletter,
So the end result is that I never get to read more than a few lines of a given post even though my visits are relatively infrequent. Not sure if other readers are having this same experience but I thought you might want to know.
Dankeschön und Tschüss!
Hi Jean, that does sometimes happen and I’m not sure why to be honest.
Try putting this into your browser directly:
https://yourdailygerman.com/german-prefix-ab-meaning/
That should work.
Hi,
2 things firstly, I think the “enough *do* digest” in the second to last paragraph should say “to digest”.
Secondly, (more interestingly I hope) I had a thought about the English meaning for “of” that is “belongs to”. And that it fits in the idea of separation (just). Either
1. You can’t it from separate them, because it belongs to then. And/Or
2. You separate the thing from its possessor conceptually in order to talk about it.
This could have started very literal as well e.g. you find something and ask “who is this _separated from_?” Or “who does this belong to?”.
Ohhh, nice!!
What you say makes perfect sense. A piece “of” the pizza also kind of belonged to the pizza once.
German just happened to use the theme “origin” here, that’s why “von”. But yeah, could have been “ab” as well.
Warning: this is probably overkill, but you got me thinking about Old English, which is one of my favorite topics.
The evolution of “of” in English is pretty interesting. Eons ago, Old English had “aef”, which was the equivalent of “ab.” It was used similarly. So:
aefgrynde / Abgrund (it’s separate from the ground, down, away)
Back then, English still had the genitive case to show possession, so no need for words like “of.” Eventually, the cases started disappearing. Around the same time, “of” (which is an unstressed version of “aef”) shifted its meaning. “Away” was still part of it, but it was also used with the meaning “out of, from, down.” The common theme I see there is pointing at some kind of origin. A few examples from back then:
with the core idea “out of”
with the core idea “from”
with the core idea “down”
Those all have some kind of starting point. We start out “in the land,” the three men start out dead, and the leaves start out on the trees. And “of” basically points at or away from that starting point. From there, it’s a pretty short jump to the meaning “belong to.” For example:
The voice comes from the child, it belongs to the child.
Hi Emanuel, thanks so much for your funny and always interesting site. A few incidental (not on theme) grammar questions this time: “es ist ein auf und ab” – no noun/object? Is this an idiom? And: “Hast du was abgekriegt” – I thought this would be “würdest du was abgekriegt”? I clearly don’t understand the grammar of your example. Might be the distance (Australia). Cheers, Andrew
“es” is the subject here. It refers as a generic stand-in to whatever you’re talking about.
“Hast du was abgekriegt” is just past tense.
Which is what we need here. We don’t want to talk about a potential, we want to inquire about reality.
– Have you been hit?
That’d be the same.
I think you might have been tripped up by “were” but it’s not a conditional form here, it’s a simple past.
Does that help?
Still confused. Normally I don’t have trouble following written German except vocab, so it’s very frustrating.
“Es ist ein auf und ab”. I get the generic “es”, but I thought it would just be “es ist auf und ab”, or “es ist ein(e) auf und ab Beziehung”. To me, your example translates as “it is an up and down”, where it seems to me it should translate as “it is up and down”, or with a noun: “it is an up and down (thing).
With “hast du was abgekriegt?” the problem is a large section of my grammar brain went AWOL, and I’d forgotten a whole group of ?passive ?reflexive verbs, where the subject is the ”receiver” of an action (cf. hast du was bekommen), and you were right, the “were” in “were you hit” tripped me up.
While I’ve got your attention , I translated “kurz” in “Können wir den Bierkasten kurz abstellen?” as “in a second”, rather than “for a second”. How do you differentiate?
That would be done via “gleich”, I imagine.
I have bad memories of “momentarily” welling up here (regarding “kurz”): in the US it can mean both “in a moment” and “for a moment”, while where I’m from™ it can only mean “for a moment”.
Ha… to me “momentarily” feels like “for the time being”. Like… a store is momentarily closed.
Did I completely hallucinate this, or is there some truth to that?
I’d be blaming the ‘shrooms for that one[#]
I can see where it comes from though: you can say “for the moment” to mean “for now” (ie, as you wrote, “for the time being”).
[[OK, that little red notification bell has just rung more than a dozen times in groups of two (I have a “two” inscribed on the symbol at the moment), at seemingly random intervals. Is there some rhyme or reason for the noises, or way to, aah, let’s say (politely!) “moderate” them a little?]]
[#] But maybe it’s another American thing that I just haven’t tripped across, so consider that a provisional judgement!
I’ll turn that bell off. It does the same to me and I can’t be bothered looking into cron jobs. It’s not that important after all :).
For the record, I have never had any shrooms and I well might not. The veil of conventional sanity is thin enough for me to get occasional glimpses beyond drug free :).
Today’s the first day I’ve ever heard the bell, and I’m more than happy to hear that it might also be the last one!
Aha, just a standard hallucination in play here, then ;-) I have some friends who are dabbling in psychedelics at the moment, but I’m 100% happy to wait until it’s a little less “Wild West” out there.
Like with many things, there’s “survivorship bias” at work. Some people really fucked up their brain with LSD or “pLaNt MeDiCiNe”, but they are usually in therapy or scared on their couch and don’t make YouTube videos about “Ayahuasca changed my life”.
I think it can be a nice tool, but yeah… the veil of sanity is thinner than many thing.
I may have (OK, I have *definitely*) given the wrong impression. This is more about microdosing (which is starting to gain some surprisingly sane and sober medical proponents!) rather than bringing back the glory days of Timothy Leary. I’m not going anywhere near the latter: one night spent first tracking down, then picking up and having to listen to my younger brother after a trip went (badly!) south, was more than enough to warn me off the home-cooked approach for life.
Where I’m from (UK) it’s both, depending on the tense.
Mostly it’s ‘for a brief moment’ (a couple of seconds, maybe), e.g.
– He momentarily forgot what he was talking about
It can be used with the future tense, meaning ‘very soon’ (seconds, a minute or two at most)
– The doctor will see you momentarily (= in a moment).
That usage feels formal and old-fashioned, mind.
Actually, the confusion is my fault, because I should have capitalized “Auf und Ab”. It’s kind of a pseudo noun here, a fixed phrase that feels like a noun. The “ein” is just its article.
Think of it this way:
– What’s your relationship like?
– It’s an up and down.
In German, you can’t just put “Beziehung” back behind “up and down”. It’s two different things, one describing the other. But in English that probably works.
– It’s an up and down relationship.
This does NOT work in German. “Auf und Ab” is not an adjective. It’s a noun.
About the other question:
– in a second = a second/short time from now – answer to “when?”
– for a second = duration – answers to “how long?”.
In my example, the question is about putting it down “for a short time”.
Hope that helps :)
– Es ist ein Auf und Ab.
Regarding the “other question”: I’m pretty sure that Agreschke was asking about the way to distinguish the two situations auf Deutsch, which is why I suggested “gleich” up above. (Aargh: the notification bells on this site are driving me batty and eating 70% of my cpu, even after a restart of the browser!)
I tried turning it off now, but there wasn’t an actual option for it so I put a dummy url for the sound and also set it to only go off on new notifications.
Let me know please if it’s quiet now.
Im Browser nichts Neuesy.
(Sorry, that’s really terrible, even by my sad standards: thank you very much, it’s delightfully quiet in here now!)
Ha, I actually liked it :)
for Some reason I couldn’t add my username in my reply above
“Auf und Ab” – riddle solved
”in a second”/“for a second” – yes pmmcann, I was looking for how to distinguish in German. So it’s “kurz” for “Can we put down the case of beer for a second?”, and “gleich” for “in a second”?
Yup!
can’t get the mic to work on chrome OS since the update. Tried it on three chromebooks and a chromebox. Nothing doing. Used to work fine.
Hmm, do you know how to access the developer console?
And in any case, try crtl+f5 to refresh all scripts once.
Always cool when this sort of meaning gets reinforced immediately: I was listening to “Langsam Gesprochene Nachrichten” yesterday (nun wahrscheinlich *zu* langsam, aber egal…) immediately tuned into the headline “Nordkorea feuert ballistische Rakete ab” and thought “Yep: fired off/launched… makes sense to use ‘ab’!”. Not that abfeuern is ein großer Geheimnis in anyone’s book, but just nice to be able to immediately confirm that mental imagery of “separating/detaching/launching” without really having to think about it.
Lifting off and taking off, sure. But what about alarms? I’ve wondered this for a while now since someone in the factory said the alarms were going “off”. Wouldn’t they go “on”? And bombs? Why do bombs go off? After reading all the threads, perhaps they are going away from their normal or resting state?
That’s more about English, right?
For bombs I would wager that it goes “off into the air”. There’s a clear notion of “leaving the container”.
As for “alarm goes off”… it’s quite loud and has an explosive quality to it. You wouldn’t say that your phone went off just because it is ringing, unless you’re in an important meeting and then your phone goes off.
I think this use might have been inspired by bombs and traps indeed, as those have been around longer than electronics.
Cool, that’s the goal of these articles… some sort of vague intuition.
This is the type of learning that i have always wanted. You really hit the nail on the head. Thank you :)
Happy to hear that :)
Anyone else have a problem with the quiz? After the matching question, the Next button takes me to the next paragraph on the page (“Oh, by the way…”) instead of the next question in the quiz. Safari on iOS 16.4.1
Can you try with a different browser? I feel like this is an Apple issue again, but might be specific to Safari.
Apple is like the new firefox… always issues.
Never any issues on MacOS if you’re willing to sell your soul to Google and just use Chrome for everything (and very few problems with “Edge” either, unsurprisingly). Well, there used to be that minor issue of having the majority of your available memory consumed, but that’s pretty much orthogonal to the problems with Safari/Firefox, and things are *much* better with automatic tab-unloading in the modern versions of these browsers.
Since early on, I attempt to pair prepositions with their opposites, ie; “ab und zu”. While that has been somewhat useful, I found these themes, and the explanations, a very helpful supplement to that concept. Vielen Dank!
Happy to hear that :)
Very worthwile article. Got all questions in quiz correct so must have absorbed your teaching, thanks
Happy to hear that :)
I would typically say “dein Bart ist weg”. Is “ab” a better choice here? I’ve always used “weg” to mean something is gone.
In this context, “ab” is definitely the better choice. The beard is “attached”, that’s why.
I was wondering about “abfahren.” Actually “auf etw. abfahren.” Like if you really like this one kind of music and you say
Ich fahr total/voll drauf ab
Would you say “ab” has the idea of “separate” or “down” there? I think of it as “interesting colloquial word, good to know it if you see it,” but I can’t really see anything deeper in it. Like “digging something.” That one doesn’t make sense to me if I try to think about it. It just means what it means.
To me, it’s the same theme as the colloquial “abgehen” in its sense of “going wild”.
The idea is “going off”. As soon as the song comes, for example, you’re “taking off”.
Does that make sense?
Oh, yeah, it does. So sort of like the moment of lift-off and then you’re “aus dem Häuschen”, maybe. I don’t know if those are the same intensity, but I think I can see the directionality now.
Pretty much the same “lane” as
– Let’s f***in gooooo brooooooooooo!!!!!
another useful article! Waaaayyy back in the day when I first starting learning basic phrases, I learnt Ich hole Sie ab, and Was geht ab – and because I had never even heard of seperable verbs, I just thought ab was the word for ‘up’. It even sounded like it. So now my brain is scarred with this wrong meaning and I have to fight against it every day. There are good days and bad days. Sometimes I just cry and shake in the corner…. anyhow, jetzt muss ich abnehmen.
In the last sentence you wrote:
“jetzt muss ich abnehmen”
I have a hunch that you meant that as “now I have to take off.”
That does NOT work.
I read the last sentence as “Now I have to lose weight.”
hahah, yes I meant losing weight. Learning german is responsible for my Kummerspeck!
Ohhhhh, das macht Sinn :D
Hi again,
Did the quiz and you have losing weight = abmachen ?!?!?
I’m assuming this is also a typo?
It is! Sorry :)
Hallo!
Abtypoing?
“belongs here, This root is of course” (belongs here, this root is of course)
“It makes sense of you think of it” (It makes sense if you think of it)
“the core theme is separation is pretty visible” (the core theme of separation is pretty visible)
“Hast du was abgekriegt.” (Hast du was abgekriegt?)
This ties in pretty well with the stuff I’ve been studying lately!!
One question:
Is “abstellen” right if the object the person’s carrying is not heavy? Or would “hinstellen” be used instead?
Bis bald!
Good question about “abstellen”
To me, it has a slight vibe of relief so yeah, for a small object like a cup, “hinstellen” is the better choice, for sure!