If you take a beginner’s course in general German, you may never encounter these verbs. If , however, you want to learn Business German efficiently, you will encounter them in the very first lesson – provided, of course, you learn Business German from a provider with proven expertise.
These four verbs are:
steigen, steigern, sinken and senken.
As you can see, two of these verbs are very similar. And so are the other two. That’s why there is a danger of confusing them.
But this can be avoided very easily. For example, there is an analogy with the English language:
‘steigen‘ means ‘to rise’, and ‘steigern‘ means ‘to raise’.
‘steigen‘, like ‘to rise’, is intransitive, meaning it has no accusative object:
“Die Produktion steigt.”
‘steigern‘, like ‘to raise’, is transitive, meaning it always needs an accusative object:
“Wir steigern die Produktion.”
The analogy with English goes even further:
‘steigen‘ and ‘to rise’ are irregular verbs.
‘steigern‘ and ‘to raise’ are regular verbs.
When the numbers are moving down, we use ‘sinken‘ and ‘senken‘ analogously:
“Die Kosten sinken.” – “Wir senken die Kosten.”
Our clients find this ‘decision tree’ very helpful in understanding this important issue: