Unterwegs!

You’ll have to bear with me here, as I am about to undergo the 30+ hours’ travel that it takes to get to New Zealand. You see, I am paying a quick visit to family and friends on those little islands down there, and it just so happens that it is pretty much the [...]

Bin sitt

Those of you who speak or are learning German may be familiar with the word satt as in ‘Ich bin satt’, meaning “I’m full as a bull/stuffed/about to pop”.
A word you may not be familiar with is sitt, which is satt’s liquid equivalent, meaning one’s thirst has been quenched. Makes sense to me! Hungrig - [...]

Wir bitten um Ihr (Miss)Verständnis

The avid readers of this blog (or should I say, ‘reader’ singular - Hi Mum!) might notice the entries a little sparse at the moment. This is because Miss V is in the land of Urlaub (where all Germans go on holiday), living it up and talking about herself in the third person in France. [...]

German Pick-up Lines (Anmachsprüche video)

I come on to German finger puppets with these slick pick-up lines.
P.S. Frohe Ostern!

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Lego block building

So I put in my two cents (or gave my mustard, as the Deutschies say) about German as a modular language.
But that was about verbs. Mmm, yes. Nouns (of the compound variety), in German, are a completely different (and somewhat maligned - by Englischers at least) phenomenon. Mark Twain wrote an essay called “The [...]

Neologistic musings

So I was thinking (and no, it DIDN’T hurt!)… a source of interest and flummoxery to Englischers learning Ze Cherman is that there is a difference between Auf Wiedersehen (literally: until seeing again!) and Auf Wiederhören (until hearing again!), depending on whether you are in person or on the telecommunications device.
Could we thus, theoretically also [...]

In celebration of the ‘chen’

Ahhhh, ze Cherman language. What CAN’T it do? Today I was thinking (as you do) about our friendly little suffix, the ‘chen’. Another quirk of Deutsch which allows the speaker to efficiently (who would have guessed!) express the smallness or cuteness of something.
The chen has given us gifts such as Brötchen (bread roll - ‘little [...]

Dedicated to my fellow antipodeans

Ever felt like the deliciousness of something could not be described by the word ‘lecker’?
Well, now there’s an alternative from downunder which will really get the message across: “that was bloody lecker!” (and no, it doesn’t mean covered in blood.)
NB: Please do not take the offence. I only make the Spaß!

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Duzen, Siezen, What-zen?

 
This whole business of having different forms of the personal pronoun ‘you’ is really confusing. Thanks a lot, Germany. Way to make your language even harder to learn.
I mean, if there was a hard and fast rule that said exactly when and with whom you are supposed to duzen and siezen, that would be okay. [...]

Acronymical (video)

 
 
Miss V, in a follow-up to her prefixation, muses on the lack of convenient acronyms in the German language.

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