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German - annehmen, aufnehmen, abnehmen.. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5187 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 1 of 8 06 October 2013 at 7:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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This is the kind of thing that has always caused meltdowns in my German.
http://www.schubert-verlag.de/aufgaben/xg/xg09_07.htm In this exercise we have 8 similar verbs based on nehmen. According to dictionaries, several of them have many different meanings. annehmen to accept, suppose, expect, adopt, assume, receive... aufnehmen to receive, pick up, admit, borrow, collect, absorb, record, meet with, include... einnehmen to take, take in, earn, engage, persuade... abnehmen to take off, remove, answer, decline, lose weight, buy zunehmen to increase, advance, gain weight, grow unternehmen to undertake, venture übernehmen to take, take over, resume, absorb, transfer, incur... mitnehmen to take along, pick up, wear out So how does one tackle this mess? I get the idea that by combining the notion of the preposition, the notion of nehmen and the context, one should be able to divine the overall meaning of the verb. I don't have to rote-memorise every single verb that is constructed in this way (although sometimes I think it might be the easier approach). Still, this seems pretty hard (especially the first three...) Does anyone have another approach to simplify this problem (aside from buying a bigger dictionary with more detailed definitions)? I'm prepared to use Anki but I'm not going to enter all 10 definitions of aufnehmen. And I realise there are going to be many more verb families just like this one. Where does it end? PS: I think Schubert-Verlag is a brilliant resource and I have been doing all their online exercises from A2 through to B1! Edited by chokofingrz on 06 October 2013 at 7:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5880 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 2 of 8 06 October 2013 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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There are two excellent books that could help you start to enjoy this German feature instead of fear it:
"A German Word Family Dictionary", by H. H. Keller "Easy Ways to Enlarge Your German Vocabulary", by Karl A. Schmidt 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 3 of 8 06 October 2013 at 11:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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All these prepositions have a certain meaning that you can combine with some ingenuity.
The problem is that in English, these combinations would usually be phrasal verbs or have a replacement in some French-based equivalent. If you know that "auf" usually means "on" or "up" then aufnehmen meaning to "pick up" or "move upwards" is quickly found. Most of the other meanings include some more figurative uses of the word. German can use these prefixes very systematically, much more so than English does nowadays. In Dutch and German this is a very productive way of making new verbs. Just put the verb and the preposition together and use some simple logic to divine what it might mean in context. Some verbs definitely have a weird meaning due to a shift - these meanings you should learn separately. But most of the time it's very straightforward. "Nehmen" is to take, "mit" is with, so "mitnehmen" is to take with you, or to include something (when you are doing calculations f. ex.). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5764 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 4 of 8 07 October 2013 at 1:11am | IP Logged | ||
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As for 'mitnehmen' meaning to wear out, it's only used for people. The idea I have of that usage is that of somebody being passively taken along for a ride on a "rollercoaster of emotions", like when experiencing or witnessing a personal tragedy or a crime. You can't do that with things that can actually be worn.
If I had to learn German as a second language, I would probably learn the common prefixes and then try to make sense of the words as I encounter them in textbooks and real life, and whenever the meaning of a German verb seemed opaque to me I'd memorize the definition together with a sample sentence. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5597 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 5 of 8 07 October 2013 at 11:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, in the expression like "Die Einrichtung sieht schon ziemlich mitgenommen aus", the verb is also used for things.
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| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5764 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 6 of 8 07 October 2013 at 1:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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You're right! Though I'd consider that to be euphemistic language.
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| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4637 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 7 of 8 07 October 2013 at 2:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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When I learned German, I treated these verbs the same way as I did with phrasal verbs in English, i.e. learning them as separate words focusing on their "basic" meaning, and then figure out any "secondary" meaning from context. The fact that you must translate e.g. aufnehemen with different verbs in English will depend on context, and the fact that the "semantic field" of verbs are not identical in the two languages.
To give an example the other way round. In English, "pick up" has a slightly different semantic meaning in these three sentences: He picked up the phone. He picked up a coin from the street. He picked up his son after the football match. In my native language I would use three different verbs to translate "pick up" in these sentences. However from context I can understand the nuance, without having necessarily studied the finer details of all possible meanings of "pick up". In general when I reach a certain level I try to learn words primarily in the context of sentences, and not as single items. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5558 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 8 of 8 08 October 2013 at 1:37pm | IP Logged | ||
I find this is the most difficult aspect of German. The cases and word order are what people usually hate about German, but I quite enjoy those bits (even if I get them wrong a lot). I have never really got the hang of it, but for what it's worth: The verbs I have best learned, are those that were presented progressively, or cropped up naturally. For me, trying to learn all variations together does not work. For other learners it may be different. I recall Languagesponge used to delight in finding all the possible variations on a root, and perhaps that is the answer, try and find pleasure in it, rather than feeling the frustration. When I occassionally do try to learn a few, I like to put down the German synonyms, rather that all the alternative English translations. And I would probably do it as a sort of mindmap thing, with all the different situations in which the different variants are applicable. The example questions in that Schubert-Velag site look like good examples of the basic meanings though. I would just try and learrn them first. I might try using that site myself Edited by schoenewaelder on 08 October 2013 at 1:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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