Hello everyone,
and welcome to e new episode of Summer, Sun and Vocab fun – the summer series where we take it easy and look at some of the words that usually fall by the wayside of courses and textbooks.
And today, we’ll take a quick look at the meaning of
streben
Let’s see… has anyone here in class ever heard of this before?
“Oh, here, here, I know, I know.”
Anyone?
“Here, here, I’m showing. Can’t you see it?”
I see it, you’re almost standing on the table. I was just waiting if someone else had an idea, too. But okay, Valentine-Alexander, tell us what you know…
“So streben is the German brother of to strive and the meani…“
Actually, imma have to stop you right there, that’s not correct Valentine-Alexander.
“What? What do you mean not correct? I don’t understand.”
Well, what you said… it was not correct. Streben is NOT related to to strive.
“But… but… I always know everything… how is that possible… I always know…. I can’t … must do research… arrrrgggghhh… ” *starts spinning and disappears in a cloud of smoke
Wow, that was unexpected.
Oh well, I have a feeling he’ll be back later.
So yeah, streben is NOT related to to strive, but Valentine-Alexander wasn’t completely off either, because in terms of meaning, streben and to strive share the theme of “putting in significant effort”.
In fact, they may even be translations for one another in some contexts and dictionaries do list them as a pair.
But the vibe is a little different, at least in my perception.
Because streben doesn’t sound as intense and “fighty” as to strive.
To me, streben sounds more like having a trajectory and you stretch yourself to get really far ahead.
And it sounds a bit “lofty” and is mainly used for ideals or other “big” things, and not so much in mundane contexts.
Like… inner contentment for example… that’s a great example for something you can streben for. Or we should say streben nach, because that’s the preposition you need with streben (which also ties in with that notion of trajectory, as nach is one of the prepositions for destinations).
- Ich strebe nach innerer Zufriedenheit.
We could translate this with to strive, but I feel like that would then sound a little more like “work” then it does with streben.
The better translations in my opinion are things like “I pursue” or “my aim is” or even “I seek“.
- Wonach strebst du im Leben?
- What are you seeking/striving for in life?
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Die Performance strebt danach, den Zuschauer für das Thema zu sensibilisieren.
- The art performance strives to /the performance‘s aim is to raise the audience’s awareness of the matter/subject/issue.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Actually, the difference in tone is more pronounced for the noun das Streben because here, the strife is DEFINITELY not a good match. Das Streben is not about a fight… it’s simply the act of streben, the act of “going toward”, the pursuit.
(EDIT: since posting this, I learned in the comments that the matching noun for to strive is striving and not strife. I’ll leave the original article version, for reference, because it’s quite a long discussion in the comments.)
- Hast du den Film “Das Streben nach Glück” gesehen?
- Have you seen the movie “The pursuit of happiness”?
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- In ihrem Streben nach einer perfekten Beziehung hat das Paar vergessen, zu genießen, was schon da ist.
- In their pursuit of the perfect relationship, the couple has forgotten to enjoy what’s already there.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Das Profitstreben des Kapitalismus ist nicht schlecht, braucht aber meiner Meinung nach einen Gegenpol.
- The profit seeking of capitalism is not bad, but needs a counterweight, in my opinion.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
I’d also say that the noun is overall more common than the verb itself.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like you’ll NEVER see streben by itself. But in daily life, it’s more likely that you see it as part of one of its prefix versions.
The Prefix Versions of “streben”
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Hi Emanuel, the bell on top of the page ( comment notification ) doesn’t work for me. It’s now showing ” 4 “.
Great article by the way.
Ich strebte vergeblich danach, deine Antworten zu sehen :(
What happens if you click on the bell?
For 1/ 2 messages it was working but now it’s piled up to 7 replies and when I click on it nothing shows up ( nothing loads ) …Now I have to find the articles I have read to check your replies.
This is exactly the kind of information I was looking for. Your post has answered many of my questions and clarified a few things I was confused about. Thank you for sharing your expertise!
I remember seeing aufstreben used as an adjective to describe Barack Obama when he was first running for US President. I understood it then to mean ambitious or up-and-coming.
“up and coming” is a better match. “ambitious” is just the character, but “aufstrebend” also describes what’s going on with the person at the moment (rising, putting in the work, etc.)
Sorry if this has been explained before, and that it’s off topic, but I love your practice pronunciation feature. However, when I try to copy your sentences in German on my iPad, only the first word is ever green. It’s as if the subsequent words aren’t compared, either that or I can’t pronounce any words in German unless they start a sentence.
” when I try to copy your sentences in German on my iPad,”
I don’t really understand what you mean by that. Why do you copy them? And where?
Also, in general iOS platforms don’t work well with this feature because Apple is not willing to implement web standards everyone else adheres to. You can try different browsers and somtimes it works, but it may be the specific iOS version that you’re using that just doesn’t work with this feature.
I cannot fix this unfortunately, because the workaround is quite complex.
Thanks
Hi Emanuel,
Thank you so much for sponsoring me and let me have the access to all of these amazing articles. It’ll surely help me a lot in my journey learning Deutsch. Vielen Dank
This is fantastic ! Love everything about the way GERMAN is taught here.
Viele Danke, Emmanuel!
Als ein Studentin der Geschichte höre ich Streben fast immer in diesem Kontext. “Die zentrale Entwicklung der Aufklärung war das Streben nach Freiheit und Vernunft”
Das ist ein super Beispiel für “streben” :)
I never get as far as the article. It tells me I’ve had my two posts so I couldn”t see the reversion or the next one streben??/[ sterben??
Hi Ruth, did you try copy pasting the link from the newsletter directly?
There’s a small note under the button, because sometimes people coming from email get blocked, even if they haven’t been on the site for a while.
If you have an active membership and you still don’t have access please send me an email and I’ll look into it. info@german-is-easy.com
I’m having the same problem.
hello !! ty for sponsoring me and letting me have access to all these wonderful articles <3 theyre the most helpful when im trying to understand some topics and they give great insight. love ur work
Willkommen Roza!
Hello everyone ! I am a new member in the community that has been granted membership. I want to express my gratitude to all the members who help others in this journey of learning but also to this amazing website that brought us all together :) Thank you !!
Welcome :)!
Hi Emanuel,
Thank you so much for this useful article. I have one question about the word “Streben”. Is “zielstrebig” also rooted from streben?
Thanks
Serkan
Yes, 100%. You’re “streben” toward a “Ziel” :)
Lieber Emanuel, ich stimme mit den anderen Leute überein, die finden, dass “streben” und “strive” nicht so unähnlich sind. “Strive” in English doesn’t necessarily have any sense of conflict (strife) built into it. It’s more about a vigorous, effortful, determined pushing toward some goal. The classic quotation that comes to mind is the last line of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” The word has a bit of an old-fashioned tinge to it now, though I find it satisfying to use in the right context. Another point of similarity: a “striver” in modern English sounds very much like “Streber,” suggesting someone who is seeking out success and advancement in a pushy, relentless, annoying way.
Just a minor remark about “Streber”… in German, it very much has an element of “trying to be liked” by the teacher for being so smart. So someone who is relentlessly pursuing the goals would not necessarily be a Streber.
I think the best English (American?) equivalent is “teacher’s pet.” Although that does imply that the person is actually succeeding in their Streben.
Is that a common insult in an American classroom? I feel like it sounds too lame and inoffensive to be actually used by kids. I feel like they’d go for something stronger to bully someone.
Well, it was common in US classrooms when I was a kid, in the 70s. Can’t say about these days…
I mean, I’m not sure what kids are calling each other these days. I don’t know that I remember it being used as an insult directly, but probably kids were called that behind their back. It’s definitely a totally normal, idiomatic description of a kid like that.
Ich habe eine Grammatik Frage.
“Am Mittwoch hatten Offiziere von Tchianis Eliteeinheit den demokratisch gewählten Präsidenten Mohamed Bazoum festgesetzt und für entmachtet erklärt.”
In this, why den is written? why no adjective ending to demokratisch? why Präsidenten? Doesn’t that make president plural here.
Given Emanuel’s away, I’ll take a stab at these questions. Corrections and/or clarifications always warmly welcomed, of course!
“demokratisch” is an adverb here, because it’s modifying “gewählten” (rather than the noun “der Präsident”), so it doesn’t get an ending. That is, it’s a democratically-elected President that’s being discussed .”der Präsident” is a weak masculine noun, which means it gets an extra “-en” ending in all cases except for the nominative. So “Ich habe letzte Woche den Präsidenten gesehen” simply means “I saw the President last week”, for example. You can find plenty of sites that give you lists of these “weak masculine nouns”: just search for that term. They’re often animals (Bär, Löwe, Rabe, zB) or professions (Fotograf, Polizist, Philosoph, zB) or national identifiers (Franzose, Kroate, Pole, zB).
Vielen Dank. Das war sehr hilfreich.
10/10.
I have nothing to add and I couldn’t have said it better.
I think German doesn’t have separate adjective and adverb, so ‘demokratisch gewählten’ is translated here as ‘democratically elected’. And Präsident is, from what I remember, from a list of funny words that changes form with case. It gains ‘en’ in accusative case. Same for the word Student.
Exactly!
In practice, though, that final “-en” is often skipped when speaking so it’s absolutely something to ignore until you actually need it for a test.
Hallo. Vielen Dank für das Sponsorship. Sie haben mir viel geholfen.
“sehr geholfen” ;)
Just one small suggestion: “in” sounds better to me here.
But sometimes “of” is better. “That’s a lesson that we can’t let fall by the wayside of history.”
Hallo! Ich bin Kayla und ich bin neu… I have been granted a scholarship by someone of you guys and I just wanted to let you know you’re efforts really do help and I am forever grateful to be able to use these tools on my learning journey! Danke schön!!
herzlich wilkommen Kayla : )
Thank you for this amazing webside and opportunity to learn german
Hallo lieber Emanuel,
Wie geht’s dir ? Ich wünsche dir alles Gute , trotz dem schlechtes Wetter dieser Saison .
Die Eine streben nach Glück oder nach viel mehr Geld, die Andere nach mehr Wissen .
Es komme darauf , auf welchen Ziel ist Man interessiert !
Bis Bald
Woher weißt du denn, dass das Wetter so schlecht ist :)? Ist das in Paris auch so, mit ständig Regen?
(ich habe es im Newsletter erwähnt, aber du hast das schon geschrieben, als ich den noch gar nicht geschickt hatte :).
Hallo schon wieder,
Ici erhalte dein Newsletter schon seit Lange , obwohl mein E-Mail ist nicht verändert. Und für schlechtes Wetter, dass ich habe es durchlebt , weil ich war im ganz Juli in Humbourg.
Du hast geschrieben:
“Ici []ich] erhalte dein Newsletter schon seit Lange , obwohl mein E-Mail ist nicht verändert. ”
Meintest du “ich erhalte den Newsletter NICHT”?
Sag mal Bescheid, dann check ich, was das Problem ist :)
Hallo lieber Emanuel,
Es ist genauso. Ich erhalte es nicht mehr.
Schönen Tag.
Ich habe gerade geguckt, und du warst tatsächlich nicht in der Liste.
Ich habe dich wieder eingetragen :)
Hallihallo,
Ich habe gestrebt danach, Typos zu entfernen:
“the audience’s awareness for the matter” (the audience’s awareness of the matter)
Aber ich habe nur eins gefunden :)
Bis bald!
I think I can add to that singleton:
I was just waiting if someone else had an idea, too => I was just waiting *to see* if someone else had an idea (The trailing “, too” can also be given the old heave-ho here. Instead you could add an “also” after “someone else”.)
up an coming, aspiring actor => up an*d* coming, aspiring actor
“I’m avers” to telling you => “I’m avers*e*” to telling you (Weirdly enough, English “averse” seems to have come from “avers” via (ye) Old(e) French)
==================
I’m not so sure that the negative/combative sense that you attribute to “strive” is really there: to my mind at least it’s just diligence, single-mindedness, dedication to achieving a goal. That is, almost solely positive. “strife” on the other hand has those negative characteristics in droves. But despite the fact that the two share a common root, to my mind nobody “feels” a connection between the two at all in modern English. Happy as always to be shown to be talking pure hogwash :-)
Almost nobody :) I think I see a connection there, but it’s definitely different than, say, “live” and “life.” At any rate, “strife” is easy to pin down and “strive” is a little harder. At least it is for me right now.
What do you think about this example with “strive”:
Do you feel anything like “fighting” or “resistance” in there? A negative tinge?
And if you take the ideas “inner peace” and “I want it” in English…how would you normally say that?
I think I would say “trying to find inner peace” or maybe “trying to achieve/maintain inner peace.” I’m not fully happy with the last two options, though. Just trying to think of how a normal person would say it, and not some mindfulness blog that may or may not have been written by an AI (thanks Google).
It sounds a little like something that would be delivered by either the sergeant in “Full Metal Jacket” or a fortune teller, particularly given its ongoing/long_lasting sense of prescriptiveness. Except that the former would probably use something vastly more colourful than “striving” here. But you’re definitely right, there’s definitely a sense of having to *push against* a condition (ie, resistance), but mostly it just sounds irreducibly mean-spirited ;-) It’s probably the case that I was mentally tossing around “striving” from the subject’s perspective, and missed this sort of external imposition. Seems somewhat strange, but it’s true to say that I’d never even noticed the phonic proximity of “strife” and “strive” before yesterday.
On the second point: “Striving for inner peace” sounds perfectly reasonable to me here, but I can’t help feeling that saying so must be leading to some kind of a trap! Of course any Buddhists are probably assisting rotten tomatoes with slow, mindful movement in the direction of their computer screens right now, due to the notion of “striving” being used in this context. (“Striving against striving against striving against … striving for inner peace”; yes, yes, it’s striving (against!?) all the way down).
We’re getting into really fine points here… the territory where translators dwell.
“there’s definitely a sense of having to *push against* a condition (ie, resistance),”
German “streben” does not really have that as much. “streben” sounds a bit positive to me, but that context of “skirting a feeling” is a bit negative, so it’s a bit of a mini-clash.
Not sure I would use “streben” here but it’s definitely possible.
Yes, you are right. I think the better noun in English is the ‘striving’. In English ‘strife ‘ (= der Streit and related to ‘streiten’) has nothing to do with striving.
I’ll actually add that as an edit note, I didn’t think of “striving” at all, but you’re totally right: striving is the counterpart, not strife.
Well, the thing is that “strife” and “striving” are etymologically related.
I think my feeling is that a ton depends on the preposition. “Striving for” really doesn’t feel fight-y to me, and I think that’s the most common use in contemporary English. But of course there’s “striving with/against,” which absolutely sounds like struggling/fighting. It’s just not as normal, sounds more archaic or epic (“Gandalf strove with the Balrog in the deeps”). So on balance, I don’t think “striving” sounds all that different from streben and it’s not a bad donkey-bridge to use. :)
Thanks for shining more light on this!! So my impression that there’s a certain notion of fighting is not completely made up, that’s good to know :)
“einen” … es ist “der Typo”, weil quasi “der Rechtschreibfehler” :).
Danke dir wie immer und liebe Grüße!!