Beautiful German Words

Why I stopped learning German. Wrestling a roof box onto the car has taken up most of my morning. I'm not bothered about dignity, so happily, I didn't lose any of that as well. The roof box sits in my backyard for eleven months doing nothing, and then reappears each July with the confidence of an insurance renewal. The camping trip it's going on is one that my wife and I have been doing for the better part of ten years now. Everything used to go into a tiny hatchback with two dogs wedged in among it.And I loaded it like a man with a Tetris high score to defend. These days we're down one dog and up two children, so the maths has changed and the hatchback lost. We're reliving our slightly more youthful selves from inside bodies that feel like they've aged twenty years over the last three. My German has gone much the same way. I had great plans about fluency, and ordering off a German menu with real confidence in what would arrive. Then early-years parenting turned up, and my memory began misplacing things that happened five minutes ago. Never mind the difference between der, die and das. What I eventually realized is that I was going at it the wrong way round. I fell for compound words back when I started Tour My Germany. The kind of words where German welds two (or more) unrelated ideas together and produces something English needs a full sentence to explain. Mind you, English decided knight and night should sound identical while sharing nothing else. So maybe the bar wasn't high to begin with. Those compound words are what I was actually after, in the same way the camping trips I remember aren't the ones where the tent went up correctly. A word you can use on a Tuesday afternoon is easier to remember than a grammar table you'll think of twice a year. So I've written up twelve of my favorite German words. One of them describes making something worse by trying to fix it, which I followed through several times before that roof box was on. → 12 Beautiful German Words That Don't Exist in English There is also a free printable on the page with all 12 words, plus pronunciations, and ways to use them in everyday situations. My son learned Purzelbaum this week, which is the German word for somersault and translates literally as tumble-tree. He enjoyed saying it nearly as much as doing it, and I've since lost track of how many he's done since. Happily, not one of them requires a verb table. P.S. The roof box is on. Whether it comes off again before October is a separate matter.

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Beautiful German Words

Why I stopped learning German.

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