Prefix Advent Calendar – 15

In this episode:

A quick look at the German word for "crime" - "das Verbrechen".

Schönen 15. Dezember euch allen!

verbrechen

Brechen means to break and verbrechen, with the change-ver, used to be just a stronger, result focused version: “to break for real, to break so it’s really broken”.
Both were also used in context of breaking the law and that’s the meaning verbrechen has today: to commit a crime.
The verb itself is rarely used, and never in present tense, but the related words, especially the noun, are super common.
der Verbrecher – the criminal
das Verbrechen – the crime

Ich habe nichts verbrochen.
I didn’t do anything wrong. (lit.: I didn’t commit a crime)

Ja, ich habe im Busch uriniert. Das ist doch kein Verbrechen.
Yes, I peed in the bush. But come on, that isn’t a crime.

Wenn ihr Fragen habt, oder ein paar eigene Beispiel ausprobieren wollt, schreibt einfach einen Kommentar.

5 2 votes

Article Rating

Your Thoughts and Questions

2 Comments

Newest

Oldest

Inline Feedbacks

View all comments

Anonymous

6 years ago

For “befehlen”, we had a famous war-related film, “Der Untergang”. But the word “Verbrecher” always makes me think of the last scene in a film from the DDR: “Ich war neunzehn”. Can’t find a clip, sadly. I saw it on DVD via Netflix. IIRC, it’s quite good for learners of German, because it’s relatively slow-paced.

Author

Emanuel

6 years ago

Reply to Anonymous

You can rent the whole thing here for 4 Euro (no idea if this works outside of Europe though)

https://www.alleskino.de/filme/spielfilme/konrad-wolf-ich-war-19-stream.html?___store=default&___from_store=pt

And here’s a clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFFuxKRLjfA

wpDiscuz

Train Your Pronunciation

close info

What is this?

With the pronunciation tool, you can check how well you pronounce a word or sentence. It uses an AI system that is being developed by EF languages for that purpose. The AI takes your input, and compares it to how a native speaker would sound. Then, it gives you feedback for each word and the sentence as a whole.

How does it work?

You put in a word or sentence or load and example from the site. Then you hit record to start and again to stop. You'll then get feedback on how you did, for each individual word and in total. The AI grades sound, emphasis and rhythm. The recording is limited to 20 seconds and will stop automatically.

How do I know what to improve if I got a low score

That's beyond what an automatic system like this can do. It's not a tool to perfect your pronunciation. It's more about giving you a rough estimate and giving you the option to actually speak. But to really iron out mistakes, you need feedback from a native speaker.

My results vary a lot

Quite a bit depends on the quality of your microphone. If there's a lot of noise around you, the AI will struggle with that. Also, the AI does better with sentences. For short words, it's not as good. Lastly, the AI is still being developed and struggles with some important words.

The recording is not working

The recording button should change color and pulsate while recording. If nothing happens, the most likely problem is that your browser is blocking the microphone. You can allow mic access by clicking on the icon left of the address in the address bar (on most browsers).

What do the colors mean

red: not very good (<20% match) yellow: okay (<50% match)

light green: good (<80% match)

green: amazing (80-99% match)

green+outline: perfect (100%)

Press to start the recording. Press again to stop.

Difficulty (only for AI exercises):