Category Archives: German language

Last night, I watched a German news broadcast about unethical repairmen overcharging their customers. A reporter posing as a housewife had three different repairmen look at her fully functional refrigerator. All three declared that it needed all kinds of work: … Continue reading →

The top dog in Germany isn’t a dog. He’s a stag. He’s der Platzhirsch: the toughest, biggest stag in the meadow. In autumn, he spends a lot of his time rounding up his harem of does and fighting off anybody … Continue reading →

The other day, I was watching one of the German zoo shows. A woman zookeeper was currycombing what I’m pretty sure was a tapir just as if he were a pony, and I wasn’t surprised because the animals I’ve seen … Continue reading →

I like to think of German as the Lego language: the basic words and prefixes combine to convey more complex meanings. The prefix er- has no meaning of its own, but it takes its base word to the limit, to … Continue reading →