Hello everyone,
quick tag-on update from last time – I have realized that there is no realistic way for me to add my own audio to all my dictionary entries any time soon. I have audio for like 3500 but there’s more than double that missing and it would take me weeks to add those.
So I have decided to include speech synthesis for now.
It’s absolutely not ideal, but I hope it’s better than nothing :)
But now, welcome to our German Word of the Day!!
And this time with a look at the meaning of
verzeihen
And verzeihen one of those below-the-radar words, as I call them.
So it’s one of those words that you kind of never really consciously notice, but once you learn about it you’ll start seeing it regularly.
And it’s good to do some verzeihen regularly. It’s healthy for our soul.
Because verzeihen means to forgive.
- “Bitte verzeih mir, die Schere… sie hat gesagt, ich soll es machen.”
“Nein… das war meine Lieblingssocke. Das verzeihe ich dir nie.” - “Please forgive me, the scissors… they told me to do it.”
“No… that was my favorite sock. I will never forgive you for that.” - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- “Ist zwischen Maria und Thomas alles wieder okay?”
“Nein, sie hat ihm die Sache an ihrem Geburtstag noch nicht verziehen.” - “Is everything okay again between Maria and Thomas?”
“No, she hasn’t forgiven him for the thing on her birthday.” - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Now some of you are probably like “Wait, I thought vergeben was to forgive.”
And that is correct, too.
But vergeben actually sounds a bit epic, and it’s not really a good fit for the small misdeeds of everyday life, like accidentally bumping into someone on the train or .. I don’t know… accidentally putting laxative into your coworker’s coffee.
vergeben is the proper word if we talk about real sins, like betrayal. Or laughing about Maria’s new hair, apparently. She REALLY didn’t take that very well. But come one… straight bumble perm curtain bangs with undercut ponytail… how do you even do that?!
Anyway, so verzeihen is about the mundane everyday stuff, vergeben about the big stuff. And the same goes for their respective nouns die Vergebung and die Verzeihung.
- Das Einhorn bittet die Eichhörnchen um Vergebung für seine Sünden.
- The unicorn begs the squirrels for forgiveness for its sins.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Thomas bittet Maria wegen seinem Kommentar um Verzeihung.
- Thomas asks Maria for forgiveness for his comment.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Actually, forgiveness sounds a little too strong in the second example and the better translation would probably just use to apologize.
- Thomas apologizes to Maria for his comment.
And in fact, Verzeihung is pretty common in daily life in contexts of just a generic apology.
- “Verzeihung, wissen Sie wie diese Frisur heißt?”
“Ähhh… nein?” - “Excuse me, do you know what this hairdo is called?”
“Uhh… nope?” - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- “Äh, Entschuldigung, Sie haben ihren Soja-Jogurt grade in meinen Einkaufswagen gelegt.”
“Oh, Verzeihung!! Ich lebe übrigens seit 3 Jahren vegan.”
“Äh… ja… sehr interessant.” - “Er… pardon me, you just put your soy yogurt into my shopping cart.”
“Oh, my apologies!! I’ve been living plant based for three years, by the way.”
“Uh… yeah… very interesting.” - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
In examples like these, Verzeihung and Entschuldigung are the same and we could switch back and forth between them.
But it would be wrong to call them synonyms.
Take these examples, for instance…
- Ich erwarte eine Entschuldigung.
- I’m expecting an apology.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Ich nehme deine Entschuldigung an.
- I accept your apology.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Faulheit ist keine Entschuldigung.
- Laziness is not an excuse.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
In all of these, Verzeihung would be completely out of place.
And the reason is that there’s one very very crucial difference between Verzeihung and Entschuldigung:
Verzeihung (forgiveness, pardon) is what the person forgiving is giving.
Entschuldigung is (usually) what the person who is apologizing is offering.
In these everyday examples where they were exchangeable it didn’t really matter…
- Verzeihung, wo ist die Toilette?
- Entschuldigung, wo ist die Toilette?
Technically, the first one is asking for forgiveness, the second one is offering an apology. But in practice, the intent is the same and they feel the same.
But it’s important to keep in mind that the two have different “directions”, if you will.
Cool.
So now we know what verzeihen and Verzeihung mean and how to use them.
What we don’t know yet is WHY they actually mean what they mean.
The family of verzeihen
I’m sure many of you, especially those of you who are regular readers of Yourdailygerman, have correctly identified the ver-prefix in the beginning – everyone’s favorite prefix.
But zeihen… is that even a thing?
Well, it actually is. It’s an old and REALLY rare verb but it does still exist, and it means to accuse.
- Ich zeihe dich der Lüge.
- I accuse you of lying.
(Der Lüge actually is a genitive, by the way. So yeah, this sounds super pompous.)
But the only place you’d hear that is on a theater stage maybe. No one talks like that in daily life anymore.
What’s more interesting here, though, is the broader family tree, which started with the unnecessarily ancient Indo-European root *deik-. This root carried the idea of showing, pointing out and besides zeihen and verzeihen, it’s also the origin of German zeigen (to show) and Zeichen (sign), the English token, and the Latin branch around dicare with words like indicate, index or dictionary.
And the original meaning of verzeihen was actually a more general idea of denying something something. Like… you “indicate it away”, in a sense.
In law, this then started being used in the context of “renouncing” one’s claim and THAT’S how it eventually became the word for to forgive.
And this brings us right to one close relative of verzeihen, that I want to tell you about.
The meaning of “verzichten”
And verzichten is pretty much what verzeihen was a few hundred years ago. Taken literally, we can think of it as “indicating away”, with the away-idea of ver. And it is essentially is about renouncing something, in the specific sense of saying no to something that you’re entitled to or that you’d like to have – be it suing your hairdresser for damages, or simply the free brownie that comes with the coffee at the new coffee place nearby.
The full phrase is verzichten auf with an Accustive, so that’s what you need if you want to connect whatever you’re “saying no” to. But you can also used it “bare” in a sense of “passing”.
- “Willst du Sahne zum Kuchen?”
“Ich will, aber ich verzichte lieber.” - “Do you want cream with the cake?”
“I do want some, but I‘ll pass.” - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- “Seit wann verzichtest du auf Geschmack?”
“Ich verzichte auf Tierprodukte, nicht auf Geschmack!! Und seit drei Jahren, und ich fühle mich super.” - “Since when do you deny yourself/say no to taste?”
“I am saying no to, pass on animal products, not to taste! And it’s three years, and I feel great.” - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Ich liebe Bier. Es fällt mir schwer, darauf zu verzichten, aber Montag Vormittag ist Montag Vormittag.
- I love beer. It’s hard for me to abstain from it/say no to it, but Monday morning is Monday morning.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Yeah… one thing I REALLY have a hard time verzichten auf are silly examples.
So Verzeihung, if they were extra silly this time :).
Anyway, that’s it for today.
This was our little look at verzeihen and verzichten. If you want a quick recap and check if you got the most important points, then you can take the little quiz below.
Let me know in the comments if you knew these before and also, if you start seeing them more now after you read about them.
And of course, if you have any questions or suggestions, leave those in the comments as well, and I’ll clear them all up as best I can.
I hope you had a good time today, have a great week and see you in the next one. Bye.
Hallo! I just wanted to thank you for sponsoring me financially so that I could learn German better. That means so much to me as a student who is struggling with living through an economic crisis. Danke schön.
verzichten is a good example of why prepositions need to be treated as integral to the verb by learners imo. Don’t think i’ve encountered a “verzichten” without an “auf”
Edit: I like the cute pencil icon for making edits
Danke für den coolen Artikel!
Kleine frage: Wo kann ich mein Profil Bild ändern?
The pictures you see are actually either generated automatically based on email address or they’re pulled from “Gravatar”, for the people who have an account there.
I don’t have an option to upload your own picture here, but I was thinking about adding it. It’s just a bit of a potential security risk, that’s why I haven’t done it till now.
An excellent article, thank you! Enjoyed the examples.;)
Freut mich :)!
Don’t understand the “what the person … is giving” vs. “what the person is offering”. Otherwise great, and interesting etymology.
I offer you my apologies (“Entschuldigung!” === “Please accept my admission of guilt (Schuld) for what happened”) for bumping into you while trying to squeeze past in the Supermarket, versus asking you to “give me forgiveness” for having done the same thing (“Ich bitte dich um Verzeihung” === “I’m asking you to give/offer me your forgiveness”).
Not sure if that helps explain the difference at play here!
Yeah, that’s what I meant. I admit, my use of offering vs giving as a distinction isn’t the most intuitive.
Thanks for clearing that up.
But I am confused by your use of the === identical operator. Clearly, the strings we’re comparing are different. I’ll head over to Stackexchange now to clear that up.
Haha: that was indeed a particularly awful choice of symbol for “is, somewhat too literally” (or some such nonsense), and I award myself eine Sechs for that. Please consider “===” to be replaced by “=~” or maybe “≈”. ((js war noch nie meine Stärke!))
In Switzerland they often say ‘Excüsi’ when they apologise for something. Like when you accidentally bump into someone in a crowd.
Sounds so cute :)
I didn’t know either word so this was very useful.
Thanks for the awesome read!
Gerne :)
Hi,
I wanted to thank you again for giving me a scholarship to learn German. You are really doing a wonderful thing by helping us.There is a saying in Turkish which is “If the world still rotates, it rotates for the sake of good people”. Danke schön :))
“do you know how this hairdo is called?”
I know you know how to fix this one ;-)
((“That hairdo? It’s called using a traditional viking horn: two simple blows and it comes bounding back to me at lightning speed.”))
I stretched as much as I could, but it still went woosh over my head :). Is it the “how”? Should that be “what”?
Yes, it should be ‘what’.
Yeah, sorry: I’ll try to be less oblique next time. I just assumed it was one of those “aargh, FFS, I know that 100%” slips back into Wort für Wort German translation sort of moments, as when some English-speaking German learners use “was” instead of “wie”.
The expression “how is it called?” can only really be interpreted (and only in certain situations) as “What is the mechanism by which that thing can be made to come to you?” (Hence my lame attempt at humour above). And even that potential usage is a bit of a stretch. It’s always “What is it called?”/”What is that sort of dog called?”.
Is that a mistake you hear a lot coming from foreigners? Because there’s a significant number of results for “how it’s called” for example… 7 FIGURES BROOOOO :).
Some of them at least are a phrasing as I used it. Would that be something that English speakers also do from time to time when they’re being colloquial, or is that an absurd sounding phrasing for an English speaker?
For this particular speaker of English it instantly jumps out as flat-out wrong (and I’d speculate that this feeling is pretty universal). The speaker would of course be understood, but it’s a pretty prominent marker of non-nativeness (like when, for example, Russians leave out a bunch of definite articles, or germans talk about having moved somewhere “for/before/since three years”, or “I have been working here since four years”). But yeah, this one does seem to be a very common mistake among English learners: I remember a few threads from the late, lamented Duolingo forums where native speakers of Spanish (among others) were puzzled by exactly this usage in English.
All the time. Seems to be a common thing in other languages.
I looked at the search results for “how it’s called” just now. There was only one that sounded like it was a native speaker. “I get how it’s called” in the context of American football. You could rephrase that as something like “I get how the refs could call that penalty.”
Yup, 100% non-native.
My wife and I try hard to keep it together and be patient and gentle correcting our kids when they talk about “how something looks like” but in our brains we’re like NONONONONONOOOO
Ohhhhh, because they went to a German school for a while :)? Do you think that’s a battle you can win?
That remains to be seen XD. I do kind of wish they had more day-to-day contact with other kids here so they’d pick up more idiomatic expressions without just being corrected.
They’ve got a few other more specifically German tendencies too, like using “else” the way you use sonst in German (“Stop it, else I’ll…”), which sounds old-timey. They tend to complain that their siblings are “bothering” (for nerven or stören) intransitively (so not “bothering me”), which just doesn’t work. That kind of thing.
Awesome content, the way of teaching is pretty good!
Thank you, Emanuel, for everything, but specially because you gave me the opportunity to have a 1 YEAR scholarship on this website. I really appreciate it!
Hallo,
Entschuldige, I’ll be showing you some typos!
better than nothings (better than nothing)
Wait, I though vergeben (Wait, I thought vergeben)
if you have any questions or suggestion (if you have any questions or suggestions)
Thanks, I never knew what the difference between verzeihen and vergeben was, now I know :)
Bis bald!
Danke für den Beitrag. Er erinnert mich an eine Kurzgeschichte aus der Schulzeit (als ich mal quasi versuchte, die Sprache zu lernen).
Sie heißt “Forgive Me” von Hans Bender und vielleicht findet ihr die Themen interessant.
https://genius.com/Hans-bender-forgive-me-annotated
Wow, that’s pretty tough reading, actually. Full of war specific vocabulary. But thanks for sharing!!
Es macht mich an heutigen Situation Europas denken . Wir sind in mitten einen grossen und unendlichen Krieg ins Herz des Kontints . Ich bin ängstlich und Wütend. Ich frage mich warum ?
Danke für ihre Beitrag .
.
das war sehr interessant!
Und *Verzeihung* für den Spam von meiner E-Mail. :(((
Oh, kein Problem. Das macht keine Umstände :)
Hallo lieber Emanuel,
Ich wüsste schon diese Verben. Noch habe ich eine Frage über das Verb bitten mit eine präposition : für und um.
Ich bitte dich um Verzeihung/ Verständnis.
Ich bitte dich für einen Rat .
Sind die beide Aussdrücke verwechselbar ? Welche ist es mehr umgänglicher ?
Im Voraus , vielen Dank
“bitten um” ist definitiv der Standard, auch wenn man “bitten für” ab und zu mal findet.
Übrigens… “verwechselbar” heißt, you can “mix them up” im Sinne von Verwirrung.
Was du hier meinst ist “austauschbar” :)
Und “mehr umgänglicher” ist doppelt. Einfach “umgänglicher” reicht schon.
Yeah, verzeihen is tricky to nail down with an English equivalent… the sort of casual same-as-Entschuldigung! version of Verzeihung! definitely works as “Pardon me!” or “I beg your pardon!” (the latter is idiomatic for sure but sounds pompous old-school to me, often also meant ironically as “wtf did you just say/do??”).
I think probably “accept an apology” really is the best overall fit. That’s more serious than “excuse sb./sth.,” which is more like entschuldigen, but not as serious as “forgive.”
Oh btw, you forgot the squirrels in the English translation of the first Vergebung example.
Fixed it, danke dir :)!
Just a quick fyi… a bot is using your username to post spam comments. I might have to flag one of your actual comments, just so they all get halted in my review cue. So don’t be confused please. Once the bot realizes the comments are not actually getting through, it’ll stop.
Oof, thanks. Hopefully it was just spoofing? I changed my password just in case.
So I actually spent two weeks with another user investigating this issue. At first, we thought that they did have a key-logger on their computer because the stuff would keep coming even after password changes.
But eventually, I could verify with 100% certainty, that the bot is in fact not logged in when doing this.
Still, I think you changing the password was a good idea.
The bot does have your username and email address, most probably from a hack on Gravatar from 2020. You can see that here.
https://haveibeenpwned.com/
Just enter your email there and you’ll see the details of the hack below.