I mean, yeah. This is an important part of the German language. They create composite words to describe a thing, and learning to break it down into its constituents is a fundamental part of reading German.
Hilfeleistungslöschgruppenfahrzeug
Hilfe - help
leistung - performance
Hilfeleistung - assistance
lösch - delete, extinguish
gruppen - group (team, department)
löschgruppen - (fire) extinguishing team or department
fahr - drive
zeug - thing
fahrzeug - vehicle
Assistance Extinguishing Team Vehicle
Now translate
Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft
It’s also one of the most difficult parts of learning German as an adult, despite being a relatively simple syntactic rule and something we kinda-sorta emulate in English. The other part, at least for me, were false friends. Also sorry to all the lurking Germans waiting to comment, I forgot all of my German the moment I graduated college.
Alles gut. Deine Vergesslichkeit hindert mich nicht daran, hier zu pfostieren.
As a German I can assure you that false friends are something you scare away all pupils (regardless of age). I have very intense memories of our English teacher correcting us again and again.
Regarding the composita in German: we are moving more towards the English approach by splitting these word monstrousities with hyphens. E.g. Donaudampfschifffahrtsamt may be spelled Donau-Dampfschifffahrts-Amt. Its way easier to read and write. While the hyphenated spelling is not something that is used often officially, it got more popular in the last decades.
My biggest issue with Duolingo trying to learn German honestly. Sure I can read a compound word when presented with it, but fucking Duo is like “Cool… now spell it… bitch”
German is phonetic though - once you know how pronunciation maps to the alphabet (and certain compounds), it becomes easier to spell any new word. It’s actually why there’s no Spelling Bee in German.
I gave up on duolingo very quickly because it had a ton of clearly wrong stuff too. Drops and Rosetta Stone have much better content for learning German.
That’s your issue? Not adjective declination?
I’m nearly at the end of Duolingo’s German content and spelling has mostly been quite easy (as a native English speaker). You want a spelling challenge, try French.
Oh I thought those were false cognates
That’s something different. False cognates are words that look related even tho they are not and often have a similar meaning that makes it look even harder to be related. False friends often are related but have a very different meaning. Like the German word “eventuell” meaning “maybe” which is very bad if you use it wrong. Unlike the false cognate “emoji” meaning “picture sign” and – etymologically speaking – having nothing to do with emoticon despite its similar meaning. Which is more a linguistic fun fact than any problem for learners.
It makes more context to translate “Zeug” as “tool” in most compound words, it is its original meaning like in Feuerzeug, Flugzeug, Fahrzeug, Rüstzeug.
In English, I like to think it would be a “thingie.” Like Germans are constantly trying to remember the word “lighter” and they’re like, “you know, the whatsit, the… fire… thingie.”
No, it’s literally not. It is “tool” or “gadget”. Not just any object or dingsbums.
Zeug used to mean something different back in the day.
In which context would you use Hilfeleistungslöschgruppenfahrzeug instead of Feuerwehrfahrzeug?
When you’re a fireman whose job is to plan which vehicles go where or when you need to precisely specify which type of fire vehicle. Non-firemen usually say Feuerwehrfahrzeug or even Feuerwehrauto.
But the firemen would just call it by it’s abbreviation HLF of course
And obviously there is a norm for all Vehicle types in use. Here is a list of all of them https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feuerwehrfahrzeuge_in_Deutschland#Feuerwehrfahrzeug-Typenliste_der_aktuell_genormten_Fahrzeuge
I mostly know Leiterwagen or Löschfahrzeug or Einsatzwagen. Feuerwehrauto is what children say. Also “Wagen” makes sense because when there is an emergency you refer to the multitude of vehicles that move out and the group of people as a “Löschzug” an “extinguishing unit” but Zug also means train and a train has “wagons” -> Wagen
We were Americans driving through Europe and the late '90s.
It was before Google translate and before Google maps. I had an HP PDA with translation app on it. I had purchased language packs for the countries we were visiting.
Down the highway we go. This beautiful black and white sign appears in the side of the road. It was 10-12 ft square with a skull and crossbones. Below the skull was a VERY long word.
We laugh nervously. What the hell was that? Yeah right?
After driving for a little while another one. Fuck. I don’t know is the serious?
Another one. Now I’m breaking out the PDA and trying to remember the alphabet soup underneath the Grimm imagery. It doesn’t have any idea what I’m talking about. We’ll see another one coming up and we debate sitting in front of it until I get a chance to get it into the translator.
It was probably the longest compound word ever created to express the term drunk driving.
Hanz! Get ze Hilfeleistungslöschgruppenfahrzeug!
We make these huge, clunky compound words so that we can introduce new abbreviations. That’s a HLF.
As someone who learnt both German and English as a second language, german was far easier to learn. Atleast the spelling and stuff makes sense.
As someone who speaks German alright (lived there awhile and studied a few years in school) gendered nouns and all of the versions of “the” are just stupidly laborious and I never cared if I got it wrong. Even if my accent was okay (it wasn’t okay, my US German teacher was Danish and I was sometimes told I sounded Danish) my lack of fucks about der, die, das, dem etc made it very obvious I wasn’t a native speaker.
All of that said, I found that popup kids book pretty easy to read.
my lack of fucks about der, die, das, dem etc made it very obvious I wasn’t a native speaker.
I employ many non native speakers and most of them struggle with their articles and are very self conscious about them. They often consider themselves bad speakers because of this and I fear they sometimes talk less because they don’t have the courage to make grammar mistakes.
I always tell them that I don’t give a fuck about articles. Most of the time they don’t convey any meaning. You can skip them or use a generic “de” to fake any article. For me as an employer it’s more important that you practice talking, get a good vocabulary and have your times (especially Präsens, Perfekt, Futur) straight.🤷
IMHO English is easier to learn in the beginning, but gets ridiculous later on. Pronunciation is completely random and makes no sense, vocabulary as well. German pronunciation is probably harder (maybe? The English “th” is a challenge as well!), and articles are stupid. But: once you have a certain level it gets way easier. Pronunciation makes sense, vocabs make sense.
For example, what’s a “plane” supposed to be? Flugzeug (“flying thing”) makes much more sense, even if it’s the first time you read it.
English spelling had a bit of a disaster. Spelling got settled over the same time pronunciation was changing, at the same time printers became a thing and people getting something printed had loads of ability to change what would be standard spelling and they liked to show off how much they knew the history of the language by inserting silent letters reminding them of the Latin or Greek root word
Also English has many more vowels than the Latin alphabet so it’s practically impossible to accurately reflect the way a word is said in its spelling and some words got frozen in text just before they changed how they were spoken and others just after so there’s no consistency
English spelling is easy!
Just learn which word comes from which language.
Kindergarden. German, you spell the i like in German.
fable. French, you don’t spell every letter
Island. French
pace. Latin, you just spell it like you read it.
English has the problem that it just took words from many other languages and kept their pronunciation.
Which leads to a whole mess of words. Older words seem to have a bit more consistency.
Gesundheit.
