{"id":2870,"date":"2014-09-22T15:56:00","date_gmt":"2014-09-22T14:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eurotalk.com\/blog\/?p=2870"},"modified":"2021-02-12T10:47:44","modified_gmt":"2021-02-12T10:47:44","slug":"language-of-the-week-german","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/language-of-the-week-german\/","title":{"rendered":"Language of the Week: German"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1500\" height=\"1008\" src=\"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/GettyImages-1205787928.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-7770\" srcset=\"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/GettyImages-1205787928.jpg 1500w, https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/GettyImages-1205787928-250x168.jpg 250w, https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/GettyImages-1205787928-700x470.jpg 700w, https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/GettyImages-1205787928-768x516.jpg 768w, https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/GettyImages-1205787928-120x81.jpg 120w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1500px) 100vw, 1500px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<style>\nli {\nlist-style-type: circle;\nfont-size: 1.2em;\n}\n<\/style>\n\n\n\n<p>As the annual festival of <a title=\"Oktoberfest\" href=\"https:\/\/www.muenchen.de\/veranstaltungen\/oktoberfest.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Oktoberfest<\/a> gets underway in Munich this week, we&#8217;ve chosen German as our latest Language of the Week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you&#8217;re anything like us, when you hear &#8216;Oktoberfest&#8217; you probably think of beer (oh &#8211; just us?) but there&#8217;s a lot more to the event than that. Oktoberfest is actually the world&#8217;s largest funfair, and it&#8217;s a 16-day festival running from late September to early October. There is a lot of beer consumed though &#8211; 6.7 million litres at the 2013 festival! &#8211; and it&#8217;s also a great place to try traditional German food.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"videoWrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"580\" height=\"326\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/pV3jF_IyGk8\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>German is often&nbsp;described as a less attractive language to learn than, say, Spanish or Italian, but we&#8217;re not sure we agree. For one thing, German&#8217;s far more creative. How many other languages have a word for &#8216;a face badly in need of a fist&#8217;? It&#8217;s&nbsp;<em>backpfeifengesicht<\/em>, in case you were interested.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here are a few fun facts about German:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>It&#8217;s an\u00a0official language of five countries: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, and has at least 100 million native speakers around the world.<\/li><li>You might know more German than you think &#8211; ever used the word &#8216;angst&#8217;, &#8216;kindergarten&#8217; or &#8216;doppelg\u00e4nger&#8217;? These are just a few examples &#8211; there are <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/german.about.com\/library\/blvoc_gerloan.htm\" target=\"_blank\">plenty more<\/a>.<\/li><li>German is known for its very long words, which are created by sticking together other words to explain a concept. In 2013, the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/world-europe-22762040\" target=\"_blank\">language lost its longest word<\/a> &#8211; <em>rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz<\/em> &#8211; which is 63 letters long and means &#8216;law delegating beef label monitoring&#8217;, thanks to a change in EU regulations.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>However, most of these long compound words don&#8217;t appear in the dictionary. The longest word that does appear is <em>kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung<\/em> (&#8216;automobile liability insurance&#8217;) at a mere 36 letters long, although we wish\u00a0<em>donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaenswitwe<\/em> (widow of a Danube steamboat company captain) was in there too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We love this video by <a title=\"Long German compound words\" href=\"https:\/\/mentalfloss.com\/article\/54048\/heres-how-crazy-long-german-words-are-made\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Language Hat<\/a>, which is a really fun explanation of&nbsp;how these long words are put together. If you don&#8217;t find yourself craving rhubarb cake or beer by the end of it, you&#8217;re doing better than us!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>&#8216;Gift&#8217; may be a nice thing in English, but in German it means &#8216;poison&#8217;, so be careful who you give it to&#8230;<\/li><li>In German, when telling the time, &#8216;half three&#8217; actually means &#8216;half an hour <em>before<\/em> three&#8217; (i.e. &#8216;half-past two&#8217;) &#8211; definitely worth knowing before making any plans.<\/li><li>Germany is often known as\u00a0<em>Das Land der Dichter und Denker<\/em>, which means &#8216;the land of poets and thinkers&#8217;. Not surprising really, since this is the country that gave\u00a0us Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein and the Brothers Grimm. It&#8217;s also the home of the first pregnancy test, invented by\u00a0German researchers\u00a0Selmar Aschheim\u00a0and\u00a0Bernhard Zondek. So now you know.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>We know there are a lot of German fans out there, so please tell us why you love the language and the country &#8211; either in the comments or on Twitter to <a title=\"EuroTalk on Twitter\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/eurotalk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">@EuroTalk<\/a> with hashtag #loveGerman \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And if we&#8217;ve convinced you to give German a go, remember you can start learning it completely free with <a title=\"uTalk German\" href=\"https:\/\/utalk.com\/app\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">uTalk<\/a> or the free demo on our <a title=\"Learn German for free\" href=\"https:\/\/eurotalk.com\/en\/resources\/learn\/german\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As the annual festival of Oktoberfest gets underway in Munich this week, we&#8217;ve chosen German as our latest Language of the Week. If you&#8217;re anything like us, when you hear &#8216;Oktoberfest&#8217; you probably think of beer (oh &#8211; just us?) but there&#8217;s a lot more to the event than that. Oktoberfest is actually the world&#8217;s &#8230; <a title=\"Language of the Week: German\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/language-of-the-week-german\/\" aria-label=\"More on Language of the Week: German\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[244,3,752],"tags":[812,759,813,814,815,419,816,78,817,243,157,818,2,819,820,398,821,27,679],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2870"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2870"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2870\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}