Tokioter, Hallenser and Ivorer – Countries & Cities and their Unusual Names in German

Recently I’ve been reading quite a lot about Tokyo and its inhabitants in the German media. The occasion is a very sad and deeply shocking one but I’m pretty sure many of you have been reading about it too and maybe the same language phenomenon caught your attention.
Namely the term used in German to refer [...]

Looking for Janus words

Have you heard of Janus words before? They are also called auto-antonyms, contranyms, antagonyms, enantiodromes, and self-antonyms and refer to words that have opposite meanings.
So, a Janus word is a word is a word with two meanings, one of which is the complete opposite of the other. Janus was a Roman god with a double [...]

International Mother Language Day 2011

Today is International Mother Language Day and it made me think of my mother tongue, Polish.
I’ve already written about how difficult this language is and why. Today I was thinking about possible reasons to learn Polish. I googled the phrase ‘why learn Polish’ and, among others, found an interesting article on ‘thousands of love-struck Brits [...]

From Ich hab Dich lieb to Ich liebe Dich!

Today is Valentine’s Day and although I’m not a big fan of this holiday I thought I could use it as an inspiration for today’s post. And fully ignoring Valentine’s Day in an article posted on February 14 didn’t seem quite all right either.
So I was thinking how to connect language and love. It isn’t [...]

erforderlich ≠ förderlich

Today’s topic is another pair of tricky German words. They seem so similar that many people assume they must be cognates. This similarity, however, is very misleading in this case. Just like the verbs (er)fordern and fördern, which have different meanings.
erforderlich (adj.) means necessary, required, prerequisite etc. Have a look at the examples:

Für mitreisende Kinder [...]

Bis dass das Geld euch scheidet

Just a little while after publishing my post on the difference between als and wie last week I was writing with my German friends and another very common mistake made by German native speakers caught my eye. Another one that I can hardly understand and I decided to devote my today’s post to it. As [...]

Wie, als, als, wie? Wie…??

The confusion between these two tiny words: wie and als is one the most common mistakes made by German native speakers. And one of the greatest mysteries to me as the explanation when to use which is very straightforward and unambiguous.
So much so that when I entered als and wie into google I immediately found [...]

Grammatical Structures, Tenses and other Musings while watching ‘Friends’

We were watching Friends with my friends yesterday. We always watch series on Thursday. Thursday is our sitcom day. We watch the in the English original with English subtitles because for one of my friends it’s also a weekly English class.
It was him who asked us yesterday if we (also English non-native speakers) paid conscious [...]

Winter surprised winter service employees…

…again! There’s a saying in Poland Winter surprised winter service employees and (un)funnily enough it comes to be true every year!
This year’s calendar winter just started yesterday and yet it has caused so many problems all over Europe so far that it’s scary to even think about the months to come.  Lufthansa and other airlines [...]

Did you know?

From time to time I like to focus on one particular language issue in my post. It was this way with mittels and it’s gonna be like this today.
Today’s issue: erachten für or erachten als?
Well, actually it’s both…
Both forms are correct. Examples:
Jede zusätzliche Aktion auf interparlamentarischer Ebene erachten wir als überaus positiv.
Er kann von diesen [...]