Are you in the holiday (or vacation) mood? The German word for holiday is ‘Urlaub’, and just like there are lots of different ways to spend your holidays, there are just as many German words for it. And – you’ve guessed it – you can write the type of holiday plus the word ‘Urlaub’ as … Read more
Let me shower you with lots of ‘Blumen’ words. The German word for flower is ‘die Blume’ (plural ‘die Blumen’), so every word ending with ‘…blume’ is also feminine. Here are some flowers that, like some of the English words, end in flower: Other types of ‘Blumen’: Then there are many words beginning with ‘Blume’. … Read more
I have written about compound nouns before in posts like Lost German compound nouns found after long search, Handschuhe – Gloves or Are you a ‘Muffel’? but I wrote them to show you the variety of compound nouns. In this blog post I’m going to answer the question: How do you determine the gender of … Read more
Last month I told you about lots of German words ending in -schein: How the German word Schein creates something special I told you that ‘schein’ means appearance, but could also mean shine. And at the end of that post I wrote: Der Schein trügt.Appearances are deceptive. This leads us nicely to words beginning with … Read more
The German word Schein can mean appearance in English, which means it can give an appearance to a piece of paper, making it worth more than a piece of paper would be. Welcome to the list of compound nouns which seem to be just a piece if paper, but with ‘schein’ added are worth keeping! … Read more
Have I got your attention? If you are expecting a krautbashing post you will be disappointed! Because this post looks at the different types of ‘Kraut’. Following on from last week’s post about 20 herbs and their names in German and English I thought it might be a good idea to talk about “Kräuter” and … Read more
Last week we had our first ever online charity event. Seven people got together for an hour and brought literal translations of German idioms and working out what they meant. Not only did we have great fun, we also raised £165 for this year’s charity. If you also like to donate, here’s the link: School Fees … Read more
Don’t you just love snow in winter? Well, maybe not when you have to drive to work… I certainly only like it when on holidays! But I do like German snow words. der Schnee – snow der Schneemann – snow man der Schneebesen – whisk (obviously nothing to do with real snow, but think what … Read more
As most of you know German words can be fun, especially those long ones. Often my students look at these words and ask me how to pronounce words like ‘Verkehrsverbindungen’ (transport connections) or ‘Haftpflichtversicherung’ (liability insurance) or ‘Geburtstagseinladung’ (birthday invitation). In a lesson it’s easy as I can give them the answer,but what to do … Read more
A new school year started this week, so I thought ‘school’ would be a great topic for our ‘German on Thursday’ post. As most of you know, the Germans love to use compound nouns (words consisting of more than one noun). In English they usually stay as two (or more) words, like ‘school bus’ whereas … Read more
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