Alle meine Entchen, redux (video)

All Germans know and love the Kinderlied ‘Alle Meine Entchen’. I decided to bring it to life with the help of some friends.
The lyrics (so you can sing along, karaoke style):
Alle meine Entchen
schwimmen auf dem See,
schwimmen auf dem See.
Köpfchen unter Wasser,
Schwänzchen in die Höh.
(All my little duckies,
swimming on the lake,
heads down underwater,
tails in 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 [...]

Miss V meets the Zungenbrecher (video)

Laugh at rather than with, as Miss V samples a splash of German tongue twisters (Zungenbrecher).

The Zungenbrecher are as follows:
Fischers Fritze fischt frische Fische;
Frische Fische fischt Fischers Fritze.
Der Dachdecker deckt dein Dach, drum dank dem Dachdecker, der dein Dach deckt.
Am Zehnten Zehnten um zehn Uhr zehn zogen zehn zahme Ziegen zehn Zentner Zucker zum [...]

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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The death of the umlaut? (video)

Jööööö, my musing on the plight of the umlaut. Including proposing a campaign to make umlauted letters part of the alphabet proper! The group can be called LOLCAKAOPULIA (League of the Linguistically Concerned, Also Known As the Organisation for the Promotion of the Advancement of the Umlauted Letters In the Alphabet). I think it’s kind [...]

And speaking of acronyms…

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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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Verbification

Verbs, as the ‘doing words’ of any language, are always the more fun than boring old nouns. Englischers ‘verb’ (or, as I like to say, ‘verbify’) nouns all the time, especially in slang. For example: if the police use a taser gun on someone, that person was ‘tasered’ (or ‘tased’ – as in “Don’t [...]