German Prefixes Explained – “be-“

Hello everyone,

and welcome to the first episode of the epic series about inseparable prefixes called

Inseparable Prefixes Explained

Yes, it’s possible and it’s happening!

The main 6 inseparable prefixes in German are

ver, er, zer, ent (emp), ge and be

And contrary to what many sources and teachers say, they each DO have a core idea.
In this series, we’ll look at each one in detail, discover the core idea and see in what shapes it shows up and forms the many verbs with their meanings that often feel oh so random.
But they’re NOT RANDOM, god damnit!!

I’m a simple guy and I don’t need much. A good meal, a cold beer, and things that make SENSE!

And if you can relate to that, you’ll love this series, because a lot of things will make a lot more sense than you ever thought possible.

Now, I won’t be talking about the general grammar of inseparable prefixes. So if you feel shaky about that, you can review it in these 2 articles:

• German Verbs in Present Tense
• German Verbs in Spoken Past Tense

But they’re not really “required”, so you can also just dive right in.

And today, we’ll start with

The Meaning and Use of “be-“

It’s one of the more common prefixes and definitely one of the ones that feel more “all over the place’.
And it’s the only one that has survived in English.

There are nowhere near as many words as in German, but there are some, and some common ones too.

• to become
• to behave
• to beget
• to bewitch
• beloved
• bewildered
• bespoke
• …

You might have never even noticed that these all share the same prefix. And they seem just as random as the German verbs with be-.
But if we look beyond the surface meaning, we’ll find that they all, in German and English, have same core theme in them.

That’s what we’ll start with and then we’ll explore how that expresses itself in the various German be-verbs so if you’re ready, let’s jumo right in

The Core Idea of the Prefix”be-“

Despite how random its verb portfolio feels, be- is actually a prefix that has one fairly clear core idea.
Here it is:

“be– carries the idea of “inflicting onto”

And here’s how I visualize it:

Sound and looks a little technical. Which is actually fine, because verbs with be- do tend to sound a bit technical actually.
But let me give you a more relatable visual for the core idea of be-:

Picture a baby exploring some object it holds. It touches it everywhere, turns it, bites on it.

That’s not literally the meaning of course. Baby is be-, as a metaphor. This vibe of “impacting” from all sides.

If this doesn’t resonate fully yet, don’t worry.
What we’ll do now is look at many examples of be-words to kind of get a sense of what we can do with this definition.

We’ll start with very clear and straight forward examples and then slowly get more and more abstract until we end up doing real mind yoga.

be-verbs with obvious meanings

We’ll start with a really obvious pair: malen and bemalen.
They can both translate to paint, but they mean very different things.

• Ich male meine Katze.
• I paint my cat.
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This means that I paint a picture of my cat.

• Ich bemale meine Katze.
• I paint my cat.
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This means that I literally paint onto my cat. I “inflict painting” on her, if you will.
Can you see the difference?
Let’s do another one: kleben and bekleben.

• Ich klebe meine Vase, denn sie war kaputt.
• I glue my vase, cause it was broken.
• Ich beklebe meine Vase mit Stoff, denn sie ist hässlich.
• I glue fabric onto my vase, because it is ugly.

In German, the vase is the direct object of the verb in BOTH sentences, but NOT in English, because the actions are actually different.
What I glue in the second example is fabric, and this “gluing fabric” is inflicted upon my vase with the be-prefix.

That’s actually a sort of grammar quirk that be-verbs have.

This doesn’t really help with getting an actual feel for the prefix, so I don’t want to spend too much time on that, but I will give you one example.

The first one is werfen vs bewerfen. Both are about throwing something at someone.

• Ich werfe Popcorn auf dich.
• I throw popcorn at you.

• Ich bewerfe dich mit Popcorn.
• I throw popcorn at you.

Do you see what happened?
With werfen alone, the popcorn was the direct object and the target was connected with a preposition. With bewerfen, it’s the other way around. The target is the direct object (dich) and the “throwing popcorn” gets inflicted on it.

But it’s not a fixed rule and like I said… our goal here today is to get a FEEL for the meaning of be-.
So let’s go back to examples.

So far, we had be-verbs that were based on other verbs.
But it also works with nouns.

Like beneiden for instance is based on der Neid (the envy) and taken literally, it means “inflicting envy on” someone.

• Ich beneide  dich.
• I envy you.
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And another really nice one like this betonen. Der Ton means the tone and the sound.
So taken literally, betonen is to inflict sound.
And while not totally obvious, it makes a lot of sense that betonen means … to emphasize.

• Ich betone die erste Silbe.
• I put a stress on the first syllable.
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• Der Politiker betont, dass er keine Steuererhöhungen mitmacht.
• The politician emphasizes that he won’t be agree on a tax increase.
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So… I think you got the idea by now and you are definitely ready for some more abstract examples.

be-verbs – Less obvious Examples

This section was a bit of a challenge honestly, because I had trouble deciding which verbs to actually include. There are just soo many good and common ones.

Let’s start with a really iconic one: begreifen.
Greifen alone means to grab something so begreifen taken literally is “to inflict grabbing on something”.
Now, remember the image with the baby?
Babies explore the world by touching a lot of things and turn them around and basically grab ’em all over… because they want to explore and they want to understand.
And with that in mind, it makes sense that the actual meaning of begreifen is: to comprehend or understand.
Or to grasp, which actually uses a similar logic.

• Ich begreife nicht, wieso du dir schon wieder ein neues Auto gekauft hast.
• I really don’t understand, why you got yourself a new car AGAIN.
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This is what I mean by slightly more abstract. begreifen is not about literally grabbing. It’s figurative. But the core theme of “inflicting onto” is very much visible.

Next example: sich beschweren.
Schwer means heavy, so if we take it literally, it would be “inflict heavy onto“.
And indeed, beschweren can mean that, though it’s very technical sounding.

• Ich habe die Plane mit Steinen beschwert, damit sie bei Wind nicht wegfliegt.
• I weighed down the tarp with stones so it wouldn’t blow away in the wind.

But what about sich beschweren.
Do you want to take a guess what it means?

Sich beschweren means to complain and while complaining itself can be a relief or the right thing to do, it does wear you down when you do it out of habit. It’s too hot. Too cold. Too this, too that. This coffee is bad, the waiter wasn’t friendly enough, blah blah blah.
And we have this habit, we do make our lives harder and things feel heavier.
And that’s the “logic” behind sich beschweren. Not logic in the sense of “This is the only meaning that would make sense.” but login in the sense of “Oh, this actually does make some sense.”

• Deutsche beschweren sich immer über das Wetter.
• Germans ALWAYS complain about the weather.
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How are you holding up so far?
Not too abstract yet, right?
Well, let’s do one that most of you know but probably never thought about: bewegen.

• Ich bewege meinen Kopf.
• I move my head.
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• Ich habe mich nicht bewegt als ich das Einhorn gesehen habe.
• I didn’t move when I saw the unicorn.
  (In German, we say “move oneself”)

Bewegen and sich bewegen mean to move, and some  of you might already see the “logic” at work here.
Der Weg means the way, and if we think about that in a somewhat physical sense of “distance traveled”, bewegen makes a lot sense. When we move our arm, it goes from A to B, so we “inflicted a path” onto it.

At this point you  might be thinking to yourself “Wait, how am I supposed to infer meanings like this? This is super random.”

But of course you CAN’T reliably do that.
Like… you can’t just open a dictionary, pick a be-verb and translate the base and then say “Oh, it’ll mean this!”
There are just way too many possibilities.

The point of what we’re doing here right now is that you learn to make sense of the meanings that DO exist so they don’t feel just like random verbs.

Our brains retain info much better if it is connected to other ideas and making sense of a meaning, seeing A logic, is much better than just seeing it as a completely random combo of letters.
And the more you do this, the more intuitive it’ll be, and you’ll see a new word in context, guess the meaning and you’ll then be like “Ohhhh, it’s probably this twist at work here!”.

All right, just wanted to mention that so you don’t feel lost.

Ready for another moderately abstract be-verb?

Nice, then let’s do a pair actually: besitzen and besetzen.
By themselves, sitzen and setzen mean to sit. The former is about being in the state of sitting and the latter, setzen, is about the act of sitting down.
Now, without context, what would you guess is the meaning of besitzen?

Don’t worry if you got it wrong. They all do make sense in their own way.

But yeah, besitzen is indeed a slightly formal word for to own.

• Ich besitze kein Auto.
• I don’t own a car.
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And to visualize it just think of The Hobbit and Smaug the Dragon literally sitting on its hoard of gold. He’s “inflicting sitting”
“Uhm, actually, Smaug wasn’t sitting, he was l…”
Yo, whoever said that, this is not Reddit okay?
“Sorry!”

So yeah, besitzen means to own and der Besitzer is the owner. The “be-sitter”, if you will. 
And besetzen? After what we just learned about besitzen, what would you say does besetzen mean?

The “logic” is the same as for besitzen, only that it’s the moment you go there to figuratively “sit down”.
Like… it’s mine now.
In our world, we have laws and ethics about what is ownership, but if you come home and Smaug is on the couch squatting your place… well… it’s kind of his place then.

• Hausbesitzer und Hausbesetzer sind sich ähnlicher als man denkt.
• Land lords and squatter have more in common than one would think.
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“OMG, Emanuel, what’s with this commie example?”
I mean, you can take me out of East Berlin, but you can’t take East Berlin out of me :).

I’m not a communist though, don’t worry. I like private property, ownership and business.
Which leads me to my sponsor: myself!
Join YourDailyGerman as a member.
It costs money, and it’s awesome value.

Oh boy… I kind of ent off the rails for a second here :D. Let’s move on.

be-verbs – Rather abstract examples

So… now that we all feel comfortable with the be-prefix and we think that we have a good idea of what it means.. it is time to challenge that.And by challenge I mean challenge… wait… I …I guess I should emphasize the second challenge… so… CHALLENGE… there you go. Let’s start with bestellen.

Stellen means something to put or to set and so bestellen logically means… to order?! How does that make any sense? I admit it is really weird but before the age of pizza service and amazon there was a time when bestellen mainly meant to cultivate your field…or something like that. Bestellen meant doing all the stuff you need to do to grow corn or whatever, and especially the planting or seeding… and now it start to work… you inflict putting on your field, you put stuff on your field so that some months later you will get to harvest something. Like today… you place your pizza order so that you can eat later. Sounds crazy but that probably the shift that happened. Of course it happened gradually but nowadays many people don’t even know about the original bestellen anymore. It is to order, full stop.

• Was für eine Pizza hast du dir bestellt?
• What pizza have you ordered?
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So… bestellen turned out to work with our be-definition but how about sich benehmen? Sich benehmen means to… uh… behave, to comport

• Du benimmst dich wie ein Urmensch.
• You act like a Neanderthal.
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• In diesem Restaurant muss man sich benehmen.
• In this restaurant one has to comport oneself.
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So… let’s see… nehmen means to take so sich benehmen should be to inflict taking on oneself… hmmm… and on the other end, to behave (good) means for most of us that we don’t do certain things in public that we do at home.. like… burping or eating with fingers… hypothetically, that is…uh… so … when we behave, we deprive ourself of some freedom in a way, we take something away from ourselves… yeah, that kind of makes sense. Quick, must get to the next example before doubt can rise. The next one is the word bekommen, which means to receive.

• Marie hat eine E-Mail bekommen.
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Wow, this one is really tough… so… when I inflict coming on something, that could mean that I come to the thing. But since we’re being abstract here, it could also mean that I make that thing come toward me… sort of… kind of like a magnet. Of course we don’t always want all the things we get but we could take the spiritual route here and say “you got that spam email because that was your karma, you attracted it”… or we could simply say that the active part of bekommen just got lost over time. But bekommen is actually one of the rare cases that are easier to understand without the while inflict-idea… bekommen has relatives in many Germanic languages, although with pretty divers meanings. Just think of bekommen vs. become. The original meaning of all those words however was … to come by. And hey, from there it is not that far to to receive.

• Ich habe zum Geburtstag ein Buch bekommen.
• I have come by a book for my birthday … lit.
• I got a book…
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Either way, for bekommen it is hard to see why it means what it means and we might as well say that the inflict-rule fails here. But works for most verbs, including the last one… and this might be a surprise… bleiben. Yes, bleiben used to be beleiben and the e disappeared over time. Now the core of that is the word Leib, which means body, so beleiben  means to inflict body on something… which is OBVIOUSLY to stay ;).

• Ich bleibe 3 Wochen in Paris.
• I inflict body on Paris for 3 weeks.
• I am going to stay in Paris for 3 weeks.
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Okay, if we want to nitpick a bit we could say, that the grammar is different here, because unlike all other be-verbs, bleiben has no direct object here but hey who cares… it just proves my next headline.

German – Sometimes it just sucks

So, I hope you have a good idea by now of what the be-prefix does with verbs. So… time to add more prefixes. That’s right. I case you didn’t know, you can take a verb that already has a prefix and add another one…

• Ich bestelle meine Karten ab.
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This sentence does NOT mean that you order things… it means that you un-order things… because the verb is abbestellen.

• I cancel my ticket reservation.

Here are some more examples.

• Ich behalte meine Schuhe an.
• anbehalten – keep wearing.
• I don’t take off my shoes.
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• Ich bereite mein Referat vor.
• vorbereiten = vor (in advance) + be (inflict) + reit (old German brother of ready)-en = to inflict ready on something in advance
• I prepare my presentation.
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• Ich benenne mich um.
• umbenennen – um (something with change) + be (inflict) + nennen (call, name)
• I change my name.
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What was that? Did someone just weep? Oh… uh… would you… would you rather have the be in front?

• Das beeindruckt mich sehr.
• be (inflict) + ein (in) + druck (pressure) – inflict imprint/impression
• That impresses me a lot.
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Still weeping? Crying even? Questioning your learning German? Are you even questioning …. everything? Like this other famous guy from that one story by Shakespeare … you know.

to “be-” or not to “be-” ?

Ohhhhh that translation was soooooooooooo bad.
I am seriously sorry, but I just couldn’t resist. So… we’re close to wrapping this up but I am sure that many of you are asking “So, can I just slap be to random words? Would that work?” And the answer is… well, yes and no. You can do it with nouns. Most people would probably understand bekäsen or bewaschmaschinen.

• Ich bekäse meine Pizza.
• I “put” cheese my pizza.

• Ich habe heute meine Wohnung bewaschmaschint.
• I got a washing machine for my flat today.

So with nouns it is ok. You can play around and invent all kinds of things there. It is fun and certainly a good conversation starter to get you “be-partnered” :). But don’t try it for verbs. Not because it doesn’t work. I think it does work for most of them. But the verb will most likely not mean what you think it means. Betrinken... yes it has a meaning but it is not just inflict drinking… it is to inflict alcohol or in other words… to get drunk. There is no logical reason for that. It could just as well have meant to drink until the thirst is gone or to drink until you have a hiccup. But it doesn’t. So… for most basic German verbs, there likely is a be-version and I am certain that you can deduce the meaning using the inflict-idea AND the context but don’t try to make up your own stuff… or do try but I think it won’t work very well. Oh and the Latin based verb, so the verbs with -ieren … they NEVER take be… it doesn’t work and I think the problem is mainly rhythm. But I digress. So… playing around with be and verbs is a tricky thing to do, and it is almost impossible for adjectives. It does work for some adjectives…  like beschönigen (whitewash), berichtigen (to correct), bekräftigen (to reinforce, to affirm) or even begrünen (plant green things somewhere) but it absolutely does not make any sense for others… there is no beschnellen or beleckeren. Logically those would make perfect sense but it just doesn’t work because language is a free spirit and grows the way it wants to grow.

Wrap up

So… I guess that was a whole load to digest but I hope that it has helped a bit clearing up the big be. The concept it adds can be described “as to inflict something on something”. It doesn’t always work and sometimes you really have to bend your mind a bit but it is a fine guideline, I hope. Grammatically, it often turns something, be it an object or a place or a person that would be connected using a preposition for the basic verb into a direct object. So it can switch the focus on objects if you will…

• Ich werfe den Ball auf dich.
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• Ich bewerfe dich (mit dem Ball).
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But there are also examples where it basically does nothing at all.

• Ich zahle meinen Kaffee.
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• Ich bezahle meinen Kaffee.
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In either version meinen Kaffee is the direct object and both sentences mean exactly the same… at least to me. So… of course I couldn’t cover all be-verbs here…not even close. I have listed some more in this table below, but still I’m sure there are many interesting ones missing… so now it’s up to you guys….

If you can think of some cool be-words, go right ahead and post them as a comment…. if you dare, give us an explanation and an example :). And of course if you have a be-verb that you can’t still make sense of… just post it and I’ll try make it work with the inflict concept.

I will collect all the verbs, put them in a list and then eventually upload a pdf right here for you to download. And lastly, if you have any questions or suggestions, of course you can leave me a comment to… go ahead – becomment me ;)
I hope you liked it and see you next time.