Word of the Day – “sparen”

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Hello everyone,

and welcome to our German Word of the Day. This time, we’ll take a look at something that Germans really love.
Which one of these three do you think it is:

a) Bier
b) making smartass comments and remarks noone asked for
c) sparen

The answer is of course,  that Germans love all these three things equally.
But today, we’ll look at the meaning of

sparen

 

Sparen is the German brother of English to spare and the two do share a core idea, which is pretty well captured by the phrase to not touch.
But the two verbs have different takes on it, and as a result, they’re not really translations. I mean, sometimes they are, but just as often they’re not.
So let’s take a look.

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Posted on June 29, 2020 by

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Word of the Day – “ungefähr”

60 comments

Hello everyone,

and welcome to our German Word of the Day. This time with a quick look at the meaning of

ungefähr

 

And if you’ve been learning German for a while a part of you might have immediately sounded the prefix alert and been like
“Hmmm… that looks a LOT like gefähr with an un-prefix. So ungefähr just gotta be the opposite of gefähr.”
But is that really what’s going on?
Let’s take a look :).

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Posted on June 20, 2020 by

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Word of the Day – “drücken”

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Hello everyone,

and welcome our German Word of the Day. And this time, we’ll take a thorough look at the meaning of

drücken

 

Actually, this is kind of the second part of our look at “der Druck“.
In the first part, we talked about the core idea of the family and then focused on the verb drucken and its prefix versions.
If you haven’t read it, you can find it here:

Word of the Day – der Druck

Today, we’ll go over the prefix versions of drücken, because there are quite a few that are absolute must haves. I mean… no pressure. But you really NEED those.
So are you ready to jump in?
Perfect….

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Posted on June 12, 2020 by

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Word of the Day – “der Druck”

53 comments

Hello everyone,

and welcome to our German Word of the Day. This time we’ll have a look at the meaning and the family of

der Druck

 

And Druck is one of those German words that really “sound the part” because it means pressure. I mean, pressure has a descriptive sound, too. Like steam hissing out from a valve. But Druck… that really sounds like the feeling of being under literal pressure. Ugh. Like when you wake up lying under your king size matress because you confused it for the blanket.
Oh well, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
Anyway, so Druck means pressure, there are loads of useful words to discover, so I’d say let’s waste no time and jump right in with some examples…

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Posted on June 3, 2020 by

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