Mastering Emotions in German: A Guide to Expressing Yourself

Here is a general overview of expressing emotions and feelings in German:

Common German Words for Emotions and Feelings

• Freude (joy)
• Traurigkeit (sadness)
• Angst (fear)
• Liebe (love)
• Wut (anger)
• Überraschung (surprise)
• Ekel (disgust)
• Sehnsucht (longing or yearning, a deep emotional state)
• Glücklich (happy)
• Traurig (sad)

Common Phrases to Express Emotions in German

• Ich liebe dich – I love you
• Ich bin glücklich – I am happy
• Ich habe Angst – I am afraid
• Ich bin traurig – I am sad
• Ich freue mich – I am glad / I am looking forward to
• Mir ist schlecht – I feel sick (can imply discomfort or distress)
• Ich bin enttäuscht – I am disappointed

Expressing Intensity of Emotions

• Sehr (very): Ich bin sehr glücklich (I am very happy)
• Ein bisschen (a little): Ich bin ein bisschen müde (I am a little tired)
• Total (totally): Ich bin total überwältigt (I am totally overwhelmed)

Cultural Note on Expression

Some emotional expressions in German may be more direct or formal compared to other languages. Also, German has some unique emotional words like “Sehnsucht,” which expresses a deep longing and doesn’t have a direct English equivalent.

If there is an interest in specific phrases for emotions or more detailed explanations on how to express feelings in certain contexts, that can be provided. Would you like examples of how to express particular emotions or feelings in German?

References

• PSYCHOLOGISM IN THE WORKS OF S. LENZ (“THE OLDEST WOMAN”)

• Why do Minor Chords Sound Sad? The Theory of Musical Equilibration andthe Emotions of Chords

• LEXICAL AND PHRASEOLOGICAL MEANS OF EXPRESSION CATEGORIES OF INTENSITY IN THE LANGUAGE OF POETRY

• Emotional Transformations and Activist Communities: Harnessing Emotion in German ANTI-RACIST and ANTI-FASCIST Political Essays

• Conceptualization of “happy-like” feelings in Japanese and its relevance to a semantic typology of emotion concepts

• Expression of Basic Emotions in Pictures by German and Vietnamese Art Therapy Students – A Comparative, Explorative Study

• The category of emotivity as a reflection of a person’s attitude to the world in prayer texts (based on the German language)

• From Controlling Emotion to Expressing Feelings in Mid-Twentieth-Century England

• Embodying Norms: Bodies and Feelings in Educational Practices over Time

• Experiencing churches as spiritual and religious places: a study on children’s emotions in church buildings during scholastic field trips

• Being moved: linguistic representation and conceptual structure

• Application Perspectives of Corpus-Based Methods Within Linguo-Cultural and Psycholinguistic Analysis: German Emotional Concept “Sehnsucht”

• Auditory Affective Norms for German: Testing the Influence of Depression and Anxiety on Valence and Arousal Ratings

• Somatism “Heart” in German and Thai Idioms: A cognitive-semantic Analysis

• Text Sentiment Analysis of German Multilevel Features Based on Self-Attention Mechanism

• Editorial: The Janus Face of Language: Where Are the Emotions in Words and Where Are the Words in Emotions?

• Language-dependent emotions in heritage and second language bilinguals: When physiological reactions deviate from feelings

• WordNet-feelings: A linguistic categorisation of human feelings

• Crowdsourcing and Validating Event-focused Emotion Corpora for German and English

• The “emotional brain” of adolescent Spanish–German heritage speakers: is emotional intelligence a proxy for productive emotional vocabulary?