Category Archives: German language
This weekend, I opened up my Rheinland-Pfalz bus-and-train circular and learned that the Reiss-Engelhorn Museums in Mannheim are hosting an exhibition that will run until late April dedicated to der Schädel. More than 300 items are on display: carved, painted, …
The German adverb mal is one of those highly useful, largely untranslatable words that foreigners can’t get right. Das Mal means time, and mal also has to do with time–it even means “times,” as in drei mal drei, three times …
The other day, Heidi and I happened upon an entire professional football (soccer) team walking down to a game. Somehow or other, that incident brought us to today’s word. Der Schmaus is a feast–an especially tasty meal that is eaten …
The Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave
When I arrived in Germany, I had a heart-to-heart with passport control at the airport. What if I needed to stay past ninety days? He told me, and our conversation ended with the friendly warning: “Take care of this, or …
Der Kreis is a circle. Der Teufel is the devil. When you’re trapped in a hopeless situation and can’t get out of it no matter which way you run, you’re stuck in a Teufelskreis: a Catch 22 situation or a …
The other day, my daughter commented on how confusing the mir ist construction can be. In lots of cases where we say, “I am,” in English, Germans say mir ist or ist mir — “it seems to me.” So, they …
Yesterday, I read this promise in an insurance advertisement: “Wir lassen Sie nicht allein” — “We don’t leave you alone.” Having been besieged before by insurance agents who wouldn’t stop calling, I found the sentence a little alarming. But a …
The other night, I was asking Heidi about the Kaiserslautern Zoo. “It’s nice,” she said. “Of course, it’s not a big zoo. But they have two lions, and lots of smaller animals. They have a petting zoo with goats and …
This morning, as I was drinking my coffee and reading the paper, I came across an ad for Katzenstreu. That got me thinking about Streu, which relates to an old word in English: to strew. Die Streu is anything we …