Question
Updated on
4 May 2021
- English (US)
- English (UK) Near fluent
-
German
Question about German
What is the difference between nahezu and beinahe and fast and beinah ?Feel free to just provide example sentences.
What is the difference between nahezu and beinahe and fast and beinah ?Feel free to just provide example sentences.
(Sie bedeuten alle "almost" auf Englisch, ich würde dankbar, wenn jemand den Unterschied zwischen denen erklärte)
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- German
Im Prinzip bedeuten alle Wörter dasselbe.
Sie hat fast alles aufgegessen.
Sie hat beinahe alles aufgegessen.
Sie hat nahezu alles aufgegessen.
Hauptsächlich benutzen wir umgangssprachlich "fast".
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- German
- English (US) Near fluent
As someone who's struggling with the same thing with another language, I must sadly tell you that there basically is no difference between those 😜
Beinahe and beinah are the same word with two spellings that are both correct.
I can tell you however, that personally "fast" is what I'd use in actual conversation, and the others I'd use in a written text, because they sound less basic. At the same time I wouldn't use them in conversation, because it doesn't really sound natural, meaning that we don't really use them when we talk casually.
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- German
I think the problem is that "almost" is very broad in its meaning while some of those german expressions are more limited:
"nahezu" describes a degree of something, so there always is a certain threshhold which is generally denoted if it's not obvious. Think about it as "almost all/completely". Situations in which it does not really work are time, age and distance, for example. You would not say
"Es ist nahezu 20:00 Uhr" or "Wir sind nahezu da". Think about "nahezu" as a mix of "close to" and "having a close relation to numbers/amounts".
fast: I think this one is very close to "almost" actually, it denotes "not quite, but almost". It's also commonly used when "measuring", so in cases when "nahezu" does not sound that good (Ich bin schon fast 12, Es ist fast 20:00 Uhr, Ich bin schon fast 1.80m groß, .....).
Fast can also be used to emphasize numbers when the speaker deems them to be very high/low (which, again, is done by using "almost" in English): Wir haben fast 2000€ an Spendengeldern eingenommen.
beinah(e): there's no difference between them, and I think that it serves a very similar function to "fast" in many cases. I personally would not use it to measure things, but prefer it when I wanted to express the idea of "close call", although "fast" works just fine in such cases as well:
Ich habe beinahe/(fast) den Zug verpasst.
An der Ampel wurde eine Frau beinahe/(fast) von einem Auto überfahren.
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- English (UK) Near fluent
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