Alternatively, etwas fertig*bringen and etwas gelingt jmdm. emphasize that
something has been achieved against odds or expectations:Die Vierjährige hatte es doch fertiggebracht, die ganze Tapete in
ihrem Kinderzimmer bunt zu malen.
The four-year-old had managed to paint all the wallpaper in her room.
Es gelang uns, den Kaufpreis um 10% herunterzuhandeln.
We managed to negotiate the purchase price down by 10%.87.3 Skills and ability
(a) Where skills which result from training are emphasized, fähig ‘able’ and its
derivatives are employed:Sie ist eine unserer fähigsten Mitarbeiterinnen.
She is one of our most capable employees.Er war so schockiert, dass er unfähig war, etwas zu tun.
He was so shocked that he was incapable of doing anything.(b) Fähigkeiten and Fertigkeiten are often mentioned together and it is difficult
to distinguish between the two terms. Fertigkeiten may, depending on context,
refer to manual skills, whereas Fähigkeiten can be of a more complex nature.
Handwerkliche Fertigkeiten are the skills the craftsman (der Handwerker) needs
to handle the tools. However, his Fähigkeiten consist in planning, carrying out,
finishing and checking the job. A few compounds where the distinction is less clear
cut are given below:-e Schreibfertigkeit ‘ability to produce a letter physically’
-e Schreibfähigkeit ‘ability to think out a text and write it down’
Lesefertigkeiten ‘basic reading skills’: the operation of putting letters together and
the ability to recognize a word and its sense
Lesefähigkeiten ‘higher reading skills’: the skill to differentiate the visual and
acoustic shape of a letter; the ability to recognize the structure of a text and, for
example, read it out loud in a meaningful way88 Conveying doubt and certainty
88.1 Defining the degree of certainty
Adverbs can qualify the degree to which something is certain (here arranged in
approximate order of increasing probability):auf keinen Fall, in keinem Fall, keinesfalls, keineswegs ‘no way, on no account’
kommt nicht in Frage ‘out of the question’
kaum, unwahrscheinlich ‘hardly, unlikely’
ungewiss ‘uncertain’
unklar ‘unclear’
einigermaßen wahrscheinlich ‘quite possible’
(ziemlich) wahrscheinlich ‘(quite) probable’88
Conveying doubt and certainty