Hello everyone,
And welcome to your German Word of the Day.
“OMG, the OG series?!?!”
Yes, it’s still running, there are still plenty of useful German words and families to explore, and today, we’ll take a look at:
The Meaning and Use of “sich weigern”
Which means we’ll also look at verweigern and a couple of other relatives you’ll come across in daily life.
But let’s start with weigern.
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Maybe that’s just me, but in the 4th quiz question it’s a bit hard to notice that there are actually 2 text fields to fill.
Oh, nice catch. Fixed it, it should show a clear border now.
Hi Emanuel, in the article you wrote: “And that’s why you CAN’T “weigern” an order, because order is a noun and would be a second direct object.” so how CAN you “weigern” an order?
Note that this is a grammar issue, not a meaning issue.
– Ich weigere (a noun).
Does NOT work, because the direct object of weigern is the reflexive pronoun.
– Ich weigere mich, den Befehl auszufuehren.
This does work. We’re not following the order, but the phrasing is using the verb ausfuehren.
If you want to connect the noun directly, you’d use “verweigern”
– Ich verweigere den Befehl.
Does that help?
Ja, danke!
Hello! I just wanted to say thank you to the nice people who have paid extra so that people who can’t afford it can also learn German, much appreciated :)
Emanuel answers queries and explores issues not usually covered, even in an American college classroom.
I once observed several German classes at a US university (won’t mention which, of course) and no instructor seemed to care to delve into what really makes German tick.
Hut ab, Alter!
Thank you Emanuel for another great article! German is pure quirky bliss:)
I also wanted to thank everyone who has gone an extra mile supporting Emanuel’s site and thus making possible for people who cannot afford the membership to get a sponsored one (like me!). I’m really grateful I have the opportunity to engage more and deeper with the German language in this fun, excessive, engaging manner, while being part of this very cool community. so, thank you lots guys <3
(I'm really struggling with changing my profile pic tho xD it was automatically taken from I-dont-know-which-place-of-my-cyber-traces!!!!!)
These pictures are pulled from Gravatar :). Chances are you signed up there at some point in some way. You can’t change it here, but if you disable it on Gravatar, it’ll be gone here as well.
Welcome!
The puzzle of language, any language, comes in unraveling her component parts!
English has its quirky spelling/pronunciation chaos, German it’s case endings
I really like having the quiz and the reading comprehension at the end. That’s very helpful.
The link to the older article on the same topic – pure nostalgia – is linked to this article.
Nah, I just used the same cartoon in this new one as in the old one :). The rest is different.
https://yourdailygerman.com/sich-weigern-meaning-german/
Thanks for this awesome German tutorial! I look forward to it now every day
Happy to report that it all worked perfectly. And also, that I managed to ace both the test and the comprehension, a performance which must have been alcoholically enhanced(*). Hey, it’s late on a Saturday night, and there’s horrible, horrible tennis on the TV!
(*) Or, at least not alcohol-impaired ;-)
Inebriated
Crushing the German practice
Life is good today.
By the way… Peter Thiel wants to know more about this performance enhancer for his next enhance-olympics.
Er hat sich geweigert, die Bundeswehrpflicht ein zu willigen.
Er hat die Bundeswehrpflicht verweigert.
Same basic meaning, merely a different way of saying a like idea.
I also have no text generation. I answered all the prompts and got “generating text…preparing questions”. And then…nothing. At all.
I am reading on an iPhone 12, running iOS 26.5.
I just fixed it. Might have to reload the scripts though, so maybe it won’t work right away for you since you just loaded the old broken script.
LOL. Not just for you. Es weigert sich, ein text auch für mich zu vorbereiten. Schade!
Sorry for some correction:
Es weigert sich, einen Text auch fuer mich vor zu bereiten.
Hab’s repariert.
Hi – the text comprehension is … um … refusing to generate for me. Is this a very meta example?
Hahaha, that would be super meta indeed.
So it literally just worked 10 minutes ago but didn’t load the layout. Now it does load the layout and doesn’t work for me either. Arghhhhh
Update: should be fixed, but probably needs a full browser reload (ctrl+f5 on windows).