Friday 27 March 2009

Der Fernseher

The last blog was about compound words. This time I'll talk about one of the nation's favourite pastimes, watching television, and I will relate this to compound words.

To watch television in German is fernsehen. It is a seperable verb which means that if you want to translate 'I watch televion' it becomes ich sehe fern. The verb joins together again if you have an auxiliary like mögen or wollen or können. I would like to watch television is ich möchte fernsehen. May I watch television is darf ich fernsehen.

Now for those compound nouns, Der Fernseher or der Fernsehapparat is the television set, and the remote control is die Fernbedienung. Die Bedienung is the shop assistant or the waiter or simply means ‘service’. It doesn’t mean remote but you can see how the word is adapted to become a remote control. Have you also noticed that the gender of compound nouns is always the same as the gender of the last part of the compound noun?

Der Fernsehfilm is a TV film, die Fernsehsendung is the TV is the TV programme. There are hundreds of compound nouns. The good news is that it makes translation a little easier because we may know part of the word and we may be half way to knowing what it means.

Bis bald

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