Hello everyone,
And welcome to your German Word of the Week.
Today we’ve gathered together here to assemble a collection of overall very useful words. Especially if we want to translate this intro, because today, we’ll take a look at the meaning and family of
sammeln
And sammeln is the German word for to collect.
I don’t have many examples yet, but here’s one:
- Ich sammele noch Ideen für Beispiele.
- I’m still collecting ideas for examples.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Maybe I should do some examples with ponies for once. Like switch it up a bit from the usual unicorns.
But anyway, while I’m still collecting examples, let’s maybe talk about the origin of the sammeln-family.
The origin of “sammeln”
Some of you were probably like “Hmm, it looks a bit like the English same.”
And maybe some were also like “Hmm, it seems like it could be related to sum.”
And maybe some even were like “Hmm, it also sounds a lot like some.”
Well, two of those three are actually correct.
Take a guess if you want to :)
***
Have you made your guess?
Then let’s solve the mystery: the two words that are related to sammeln are… drumroll… same and some.
The origin is the brazenly ancient Indo-European root *sem- which expressed the idea of “as one, together” and besides same and some, it’s also the origin of words like similar, simple, single and to seem. Also the Greek prefix *homo- belongs here, and the Sansrkit words samsara and Sanskrit itself. Those are more for the real etymology nerds though.
The most helpful relatives for learners are probably resemble, semblance and assemble.
Because here, we can nicely see the connection between the idea of same, similar (resemble) and the idea of bringing together (assemble).
So it makes perfect sense that sammeln ended up the German word for to collect, to gather.
And now I have collected enough examples, so let’s look at some of them.
“sammeln” in practice
And overall, sammeln and to collect and to gather line up fairly well.
- In dem Topf sammeln die Ponys das Regenwasser.
- In the pot, the ponies are collecting the rain water.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Als Kind habe ich Ponys gesammelt.
- When I was a kid, I collected ponies.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Das Pony sammelt Kraft, bevor es ins Einkaufszentrum geht.
- The pony is gathering strength before it heads to the mall.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
It’s also fairly commonly used with a self reference in Accusative – sich sammeln .
And that can either be about a bunch of individuals gathering up somewhere, but also a more broad sense of being collected or even just piling up.
- Abends sammeln sich die Ponys am Fluß.
- In the evenings, the ponies gather at the river.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- “Gestern habe ich zufällig Thomas getroffen. Diesmal beim Ponykologen.”
“Schon wieder? Diese Zufälle sammeln sich langsam.” - “Yesterday, I randomly met Thomas. This time, at the Ponycologist.”
“Again?! These “random incidents” are starting to pile up.” - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Oh, and it can be used in the sense of gathering oneself, like calming down, getting one’s focus and so on.
- Ich war vor der Präsentation super nervös, und musste mich kurz sammeln.
- I was super nervous before the presentation and had to gather myself for a bit.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
So far, this was all pretty straightforward I think and the nouns are quite self-explanatory as well.
- Thomas will Maria seine Pony-Briefmarken-Sammlung zeigen.
- Thomas wants to show Maria his collection of pony stamps.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- “Idioten” ist ein Sammelbegriff für die verschiedenen Personen bei mir auf Arbeit.
- “Idiots” is an umbrella term for the various persons at my work.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Am Wochenende sind im Park viele Flaschensammler unterwegs.
- On the weekends, there are a lot of people collecting bottles out in the park.
(They return them for the deposit. Don’t put your bottle in the bin in Berlin. Put them next to them)
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
There are a few differences here and there, where two words don’t line up perfectly. Like, a “collection of fine wine” at a restaurant would probably be called die Auswahl (selection), and a technical device collecting something is usually called der Kollektor.
But these differences really aren’t anything worth losing sleep over and definitely not something you need to note down or study. They’re things to be “experienced”, not “learned”.
The 80/20 rule definitely applies to language learning and vocabulary. Get 80% of the meaning in 20% of the time – don’t spend 80% to get the remaining 20%.
What IS usually worth spending some time on with German verbs, though, are their prefix versions.
So let’s collect a few.
The prefix versions of “sammeln”
Luckily, there aren’t many versions of sammeln and all of them tie in very clearly with the core notion of gathering.
First up, we have aufsammeln, which is basically about collecting off of the floor.
- Das Pony sammelt seine Notizen auf, die es nach der Präsentation triumphierend in den Meetingraum geschmissen hatte.
- The pony collects its notes off the floor, which it had triumphantly thrown into the meeting room after the presentation.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
If you think I’m pushing it too far with the pony examples. You’re wrong! In fact, I’m going all in now.
It’ll be the greatest pony sentence collection on the web. The Ponypedia. And all the new AI models will use it for training, so I get to shape how future generations think of ponies, muahahahahaaahahah.
Anyway… I think it’s worth mentioning there is a notion of trash or at least dropped things in this verb though, so you wouldn’t really use it for collecting mushrooms. That’s just Pilze sammeln.
Anyway, next up, we have einsammeln which is also collecting, but this time with a focus on “taking out of circulation”.
- Vor der Präsentation hat das Pony die Handies seiner Kollegen eingesammelt.
- Before the presentation, the pony collected the pones… I mean phones of its colleagues.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
If we were to just use sammeln here, it would sound like it’s trying to create a collection – the ein really adds this sense that it’s about the phones not being “out there” anymore.
All right, the next one worth mentioning is ansammeln which is pretty much always used with a self reference, so sich ansammelt. And it expresses the idea of things accumulating. Like… things slowly piling up somewhere.
- Über die Zeit haben sich die Pony-Haare im Ausguß angesammelt und ihn verstopft.
- Over time, the pony hairs have accumulated in the drain and have clogged it.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- In diesem Artikel gibt es eine Ansammlung von dummen Ponysätzen.
- In this article, there is a pile-up/accumulation of dumb pony sentences.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
And last but not least we have the end boss of prefixes… ver.
And versammeln is about gathering in the sense of … well… people gathering somewhere. And again, it’s usually used with a self reference, because you need to have a direct object in German here. So when a bunch of people gather, in German you say they “gather themselves“.
- Die Ponys versammeln sich einmal in der Woche um den Putzplan zu besprechen.
- The ponies gather/come together once a week to talk cleaning schedule.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Die Einhörner versuchen die Pony-Versammlung zu stören.
- The unicorns try to disrupt the pony assembly.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Wir haben uns heute hier versammelt um zusammen eine Sammlung von insgesamt sehr nützlichen Wörtern zu sammeln. Und Ponys.
- We have gathered here today, to assemble a collection of overall very useful words together. And ponies.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
You probably noticed it.. the last example was the one we had in the intro. And besides the words we’ve already talked about, there’s a couple more to be found. So as a last point for today, let’s look at the extended family.
More relatives of “sammeln”
The word that’s probably most familiar to all of you and that I’m sure many noticed in the example is zusammen. Which is the German word for together. sammeln – to gather, zusammen – together…. makes a lot of sense, I think :).
- Thomas und Maria sind nicht mehr zusammen, wohnen aber noch zusammen. Wegen ihrer Ponys.
- Thomas and Maria are not together anymore but are still living together. Because of their ponies.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Now, German also has the word gemeinsam, which also means together. And many learners are at some point wondering what the difference is between gemeinsam and zusammen, so let’s clear that up real quick.
The two do overlap quite a bit, so they can definitely be synonyms at times. But the key difference is that gemeinsam has a notion of community. I mean, gemein and common are related after all. We’ve actually explored that in detail in a separate article though, where we also look at words like die Gemeinschaft (the community) and die Gemeinsamkeit, so I’ll just leave a link below if you want to explore that family further.
But yeah… zusammen is a neutral “as one”, while gemeinsam has a notion of as a team or something and hence mainly works for people.
So it would be kind of out of place if you want to ask how much three items cost together.
- Die Schuhe und die Hose haben zusammen 100 Euro gekostet. Oder 1 Pony.
- The shoes and the pants together cost 110 dollars. Or one Pony.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
But it’s not like zusammen doesn’t work for people or community. It works well for that, too. So actually, maybe just stick with zusammen, because that one is much broader and includes a lot of gemeinsam as well.
Now, besides gemeinsam and zusammen, another relative is gesamt. Literally, it kind of is a ge-form of an older version of sammeln. So gesamt originally simply meant “gathered together”, but now it’s more broadly about the core idea of sum or whole.
The exact translation depends on the context though.
- Die Ponys haben den gesamten Moonshine ausgetrunken.
- The ponies drank up all the moonshine/the entire moonshine.
(Using “ganz-” is more common in these types of statements)
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Das Gesamtgewicht des Pony-Models darf 200 kg nicht überschreiten, sonst bricht der Laufsteg zusammen.
- The total weight of the pony model must not exceed 200 kg, or else the catwalk will collapse.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
There’s actually a plethora of compound nouns with gesamt, but they’re all kind of technical or niche.
I think the more useful word really is insgesamt, which means overall, all in all or in total.
- Ich habe heute insgesamt 3 Liter Flüßigkeit getrunken.
Inklusive Pony-Milch. - Today, I drank a total of three liters of liquid.
Including the pony milk. - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Ich bin insgesamt sehr zufrieden mit den Pony-Beispielen.
- I’m overall pretty satisfied with the pony examples.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
And then, last but not least, let’s mention samt and its cousin mitsamt. Which are both prepositions that express the idea of together with.
- Das Pony isst die Melone mitsamt der Schale.
- The pony eats the melon together with/including the rind.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
It’s not really one you’ll hear often in daily life, but it IS one of those where if you use it with Dative, someone jumps out of the bush and tells you that A:C:T:U:A:L:L:Y it’s a Genitive preposition. Then, just say “Wow, danke, wegen dir spreche ich jetzt besser.” and enjoy seeing them trying to keep it together.
Anyway, there are still some more words in the family that we haven’t mentioned yet. Particularly the verbs with zusammen as a prefix, like zusammenarbeiten and so on. But I think you can get most if not all of these from the context, and we’ve certainly done enough for today. It’s actually 36 degrees celsius right now as I am typing this.
So yeah, let’s wrap it up for today and let it simmer :).
As usual, I have prepared a little quiz for you, if you want to check how much you remember.
And of course, if you have any questions about any of this, just leave me a comment and we’ll try to clear things up zusammen.
I hope you liked it, have a great week and I’ll see you next time.
further reading:
- The meanings of “gemein”
- zusammenschreiben or zusammen schreiben
(A quiz about the blurry edges between prefix and separate word)
Es tur mir furchtbar leid, aber auf English (zumindest amerikanisches Englisch) haben Melone kein “peel,” sondern ein “rind.” English hat eine imponierende Sammlung von Wörtern für Obst- und Gemüseschalen, z.B., skin, peel, rind, shell und husk.
Oh, das wusste ich nicht :). Danke dir!
Can “sich sammeln” sometimes be a synonym for “sich ansammeln” and “sich sammeln” for “sich versammeln”?
Yes, both.
tiny comment, off topic: der Sprung
broke my brain when I learned it
Really? Why? Too many meanings?
Because it’s a der -ung noun!
Ohhhhhhh, well not really. The “-ung” is not an ending here but part of the stem.
– gesprungen
– der Sprung
I get it now — but I still felt lied to!
Fair :).
As promised elsewhere, a few bits and bobs to get me “back on the pony”… First off a couple of miniscule corrections.
Ponies => Ponys (Not sure here, but I suspect your hearty embrace of English is starting showing in your German pluralisations! Similarly with “Handies” later on in the article, which I’m guessing should be Handys??)
the ponies gather up at the river => the ponies gather ** at the river
(“gather up” is a bit of a weird one: opinions may differ a little here (shocker!) but for me that expression only really works in an active sense. eg, as a command — a mother says to her daughter at the beach “Gather up your friends, and let’s head home”, or “Gather up your things and go!”. Even the former example sounds a little odd, because there’s a feeling of the “tragbar” about the expression, and thus more akin to picking your stuff off the floor (hence more “aufsammeln”(ish), I guess…). The more passive sort of “self-gathering” that the ponies engage in would be a raw “gather”, or perhaps even “assemble”. In any case, there are a couple of occurrences of “ponies gather(ing) up”, and I think both should be just “gather”)
which is very is again also => which is very *much again about* (Gazillions of other options would also work here, of course!)
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((Rambling mode on…)) I was really hoping to discover something connecting “sammeln” or “Sammlung” to sets (in the sense of “Set Theory”). Georg Cantor has an oft-quoted, and öfter-misquoted characterization of a (mathematical) set as being “a many that can be thought of as a one”. But contrary to my hopes and dreams, the original word for “Set” turns out to be “Menge”, which I always associate with a *lot* or a *crowd*, but should also make room for the more neutral “quantity”, and (eek, I just looked it up) a lot of other meanings as well. In that sense it’s actually a *great* match-up for the English word “set”, which actually has the longest entry in the full Oxford English Dictionary, comprising 430 different senses ;-)
In any case, a slightly abbreviated version of the original pseudo-definition of “set” is: “Unter einer ‘Menge’ verstehen wir jede Zusammenfassung von bestimmten wohlunterschiedenen Objekten unserer Anschauung oder unseres Denkens zu einem Ganzen.” (By a ‘set’ we mean any combination/pooling of particular well-differentiated objects of our perception or our thought into a whole). I guess we’re going to have to make do with the slightly obscure notion of “Zusammenfassung” as “combination/pooling” as our connection with the article! Ah well… I must admit that even the German term for Set Theory was a bit of a surprise: it’s “Mengenlehre”.
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Anyway, that’ll do: I’ve happily excised a rather ramshackle stream-of-consciousness stemming from the various, quite extensive senses of “gather”, as this is already more than long enough!
Oh, “gather up” is an interesting one. I hadn’t noticed that. In this example:
I would say that if the river was somehow “up” in relation to where I am now. Like if the river is north of here. So “up at the river” describes the location. It’s not the verb “gather up.”
And this one:
I would say
“Gather up” doesn’t sound good to me here, but I did a quick search and saw a few results from Twitter/Tiktok where it was used like this. I try to not be all “get off my lawn” about new trends in language, but sometimes Youtube/Tiktok lingo can sound a little off. Adjective order, I’m looking at you….
Yeah, I also pondered associating “up” with “the river”, but I think from the italicization it was “gather_up” that was intended, rather than “gathering up_at_the_river”. And, as above, I really don’t think it works in that way. “Get together” is, however, a nice, neutral sort of formulation of the notion at play. ((Confession time: I have a pretty much empty intersection with the vagaries and vacancies of Tiktok. I guess it’s just an age thing, but the first handful of words that jump to mind are *astonishingly and consistently vacuous*. Hey, freakin’ *Instagram* leans more than enough in that direction for me! ))
Yeah, I did intend “gather up”. As for TikTok… I don’t think it’s the age. I’m not touching TikTok either, and I don’t have age yet.
The good parts of TikTok end up on Youtube anyways, so I’ll see them there, without all the surreal Kubrick dystopian movie style garbage.
If you want to see a fever dream on screen though, I recommend watching a “weird TikTok compilation” on Youtube.
When I saw my first one, I thought “OMG, this is how dystopian science fiction movies in the 80s thought entertainment would be in the future and they nailed it”
Welcome back :)!!
re: “ponies” – Oh yes, English spelling is messing with my German spelling. It feels really weird to me to write “Ponys” actually, but you’re completely right – German does NOT change the “y”
As for “assemble” – I would use that as a translation for “sich versammeln”, but not for “sich sammeln”. The reason is that I feel like “assemble” is VERY intentional, while “sich sammeln” is more casual and coincidental sounding.
As for “Sammlung”: I think the main reason why it wouldn’t really work for a mathematical set is that it implies the deed of “collecting”. A mathematical set however is just an act of partitioning a section out of a whole.
I think the translation of the definition (“a many that can be thought of as a whole”) is not very good, at least in the context of mathematics, because at as far as I know, a Menge can be empty or have just one element, and ” many” clearly would not apply. The original defition is trying really hard to be precise so making it into a catchy phrase must lead to loss.
In part, it might be a translation issue though, and it might well be based on the fact that Menge and many are kin.
Menge is an interesting word, actually. I have completely overlooked it, but it might be worth an article.
But till then… Menge is kind of a noun of “manche”, and the English relative is “many”. So maybe the translator knew that and use “a many” in more of a sense of “a some”, which would then better fit with the potential “a (n)one”.
The original definition is awful, because I have to read it thrice to even understand what the man is saying. It also kinda sorta lowkey excludes single item and empty sets but at least it’s not as in the face about it as the English shortation.
TL DR (reddit armchair expert edition):
Cantor can’t even describe his stuff properly, lol. I doubt he even invented set theory. Set theory is a CIA psyop, by the way. Rogan said it the other day, too. dyor, if you don’t believe me.
Hmm, with “Sammlung” my image was more “plucking out”, or selecting *some* from a bigger field (no pun intended) of possible choices, whether done through a function or some kind of family *resemblance*. eg, the set of rational numbers (as a subset of the reals, or complex numbers for that matter). As for singleton sets, or the empty set, well, nobody really cares about them, they’re just there for *completeness’* sake, if you’ll excuse another of Cantor’s motivations! I guess some pervies get excited building the natural numbers via the empty set, but let’s leave them to their sandboxes;-) To be brutally honest here: the only sets of any consequence are infinite, and those with real impact are all uncountably infinite! I’m only 1/4-joking, of course, as it was, amazingly enough, exactly these kind of distinctions and qualifications that gave the development of the theory any oomph at all (eg, in questions regarding the pointwise or uniform, or *almost everywhere* convergence of Fourier series, usw: essentially, the nature of the sets where such convergence can fail).
As for Rogan:you must be, aah, *joshing* (a lovely word!). Yes, yes, I know… A career worth hundreds of millions built on affability, gullibility, and an enormous dollop of “learned cluelessness™”. Super impressive, at least abstractly…
My theory is that for a time he really liked the persona of “that gym MMA bro that also does comedy AND who is capable of first principle questioning and talking to “intellectuals””.
But the fad these days is to just ramble about something and talk about how crazy everything is. I think he got bored with that persona and shifted into his current form. Which might well be his true self.
The Greek tragedy about Joe Rogan is that he legit thinks he’s funny and he really thinks he’s a standup comedian.
I can highly recommend this video. A very very refined takedown of his latest netflix special.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EuKibmlll4
Even if you don’t care about Joe’s standup (and I think you do NOT), this video is great work and I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy it.
Ugh, that was just horrible… even beyond my worst imaginings. To be honest, I had no idea that Rogan even *did* stand-up, having only ever encountered his stuff via excerpts from some of the podcasts with –in the main– intrinsically interesting guests, in which the “hey, I’m an absolute doofus, explain it to me…” role can actually work well. Most of these were from several years ago, now that I think about it, so it seems things have gone a long way downhill in the interim. But, yeah, that “stand-up routine” was beyond embarrassing, to the point where you have to wonder how he could ever bear to let any friends watch that thing, let alone have to cope *himself* with a potential rescreening. It says a lot about the layer of insulation in which he’s become wrapped that nobody therein managed to convince him to nuke the whole project.
In reading a page or two of youtube comments perhaps the best I tripped across was “He does for comedy what Australia does for breaking”. (aka, “Joe Raygun”). Which is overly harsh on our breaking superstar (that’s the dancer, not the podcaster, just to be clear!).
Mad props to the guy who made the video, even if some of the metaphorical shadow/sweat/Jungian stuff fell a bit flat: more boos in Joe’s direction for not sweating sufficiently to fit the narrative, obviously! (I’m actually more shocked that the volume of sweat produced by someone doing an hour of cringe-inducing stand-up wasn’t measured in *gallons*.)
Is “absammeln” a thing at all? I think I’ve heard it before, but not sure if it’s regional.
Oh, and I came across this cartoon when I was looking for example sentences :)
Just leaving a comment to say a huge thank you to this community for supporting my membership. It means so much that despite my financial situation, I can access resources and keep learning German. All thanks to the kindness and generosity of each of you. Thank you!
The body of your email is nice content on its own. If I remember you painted your one wall forest green a couple of months ago. I like the idea of someone jumping from behind the bush and insisting on the genitive. The relative complexity of German is one of its “precision engineered” features While I was going through your lesson, I was eating pieces of bread soaked in olive oil & topped with cheese, salami & cucumber. Appropriately the brand of the salami was “Feinschmecker”.
Haha, yeah, actually, one wall is dark olive green, one kitchen corner is black with silver sparkles and one wall is forest green.
I’m not done though, and it was time for a ceiling. I’ve picked a grey-beige, which is really unclear as to what it is, so it kind of picks up the wall colors. Really happy with it so far.
I would just like to quickly thank the members on this platform who choose to put in some extra money for the community so that people like me can greatly benefit from it. Thank you!
What a blog to stumble upon!!
For sich sammeln in the sense of calming down, collect oneself is absolutely idiomatic in English (better than “gather”).
I’m vaguely disappointed that sammeln isn’t related to Semmeln
Fantastic recap of “alles rund um sammeln”!
Very good. I’m glad I ponied up.
LOL, nice one :D
Hallo,
Ich habe Typos eigesammelt!! (is this the most adequate verb here?)
Of the two words that are related to sammeln are (the two words that are related to sammeln are)
semblance (semblance)
straight forward (straightforward)
self explanatory (self-explanatory)
collections of pony stamps (collection of pony stamps – nothing wrong with the plural, but the german sentence uses Sammlung)
aren’t anything losing sleep over (aren’t anything worth losing sleep over)
which is had triumphantly (which it had triumphantly)
the idea of things accumulate (the idea of things accumulating)
many learner are at some point wondering (many learners are at some point wondering)
cat walk (catwalk)
Genetive preposition (Genitive preposition)
I have prepared little quiz for you (I have prepared a little quiz for you)
Quiz:
Question 4: The noun of a prefix versions (The noun of a prefix version)
Toll, now I have a better understanding of sammeln :)
Bis bald!
Wow, diesmal haben sich einige Fehler angesammelt! Danke für’s sammeln (zusammentragen).
“einsammeln” würde hier nicht passen, denn die Fehler sind ja noch da, wenn du fertig bist, und man kann sie nicht einsammeln, sondern einfach nur wegmachen :)
Liebe Grüße und danke!
Myn Pony ist en Appenzeller
Es frißt de Chäs mitsamt em Täller
jö du le dudu
If this isn’t a song yet, it should be one :D