sich zusammenreißen

Word type: verb
Based on: reißen

Perfect (spoken past): hat zusammengerissen

Preterite (written past): riss zusammen

Meanings

1.

to pull oneself together, to keep it together, to get a grip on oneself

(The self reference is in Accusative and MUST be there. The core idea is that you discipline yourself.)

How useful:

Opposite (closest): durchdrehen

Word Family

Root: *uer-

This root is only mentioned in German etymological sources, but not in the English ones I am using.

The core idea of it was:

rip open, carving

According to German etymological sources, it is probably the origin of to write, but at least Etymonline states that the origin of write is uncertain.
It would make sense though, if you think of writing as carving something into wood or stone.

In German, reißen (to rip) and ritzen (to make small scratches) are fairly close to the original sense. The branch around Reiz (stimulus) is a bit more figurative, but still makes sense if you think of scratching your skin as one of the basic stimuli you can feel.

0 0 votes

Article Rating

Questions and Comments

🗨

Subscribe

0 Comments

Inline Feedbacks

View all comments

Train Your Pronunciation

x

?

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%)

Difficulty (only for AI exercises):