Some of you might even know the English equivalent earworm. I’m actually talking about a highly catchy song, which is also called “Ohrwurm” in German. That’s just a strange folk tale that my mean older brother told me when I was little. I’m just kidding – earwigs only eat plant lice and fruits. I’m not talking about the insect that crawls into your ear at night and eats your brain. You can find out more about German beer culture in this article. The word is closely related to “ bitterernst”, which is more common and basically means the same thing.Įven though “ bierernst” isn’t used a lot, I think it’s hilarious that such a word exists in the German language. It can either refer to someone who’s dead severe or to a very grave situation. Germans don’t joke when it comes to beer!īierernst is mainly used as an adjective.
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This article will provide you with a list of the coolest German words I could think of.Įnjoy! The Ultimate List of Cool German Words It often seems impossible to translate those funny German expressions into English.īut I’ve tried in order to share them with you. And I had said something sounding a lot like that in the middle of the café at university.Is there anything more fascinating than languages? Each one has a significant number of words with unique and sometimes hilarious meanings.īelieve me or not, but this also goes for German. My friends laughed, and after a minute of awkward laughing and people around us hearing, I was told that “einen fahren lassen” (literally: to let one drive) means to fart. Though it might not exactly fit into the scheme of “not translatable in English”, this caused an embarrassing moment when I said the word “Fahrlässigkeit” ( carelessness) incorrectly and it sounded like the above phrase. So if someone is driving around slowly when you really want them to speed up, they should damn well stop cucumbering around!īonus round here. I guess cucumbers don’t exactly travel at high speed! This word is apparently used a lot of cars. I love this word because the literal translation in English would be “to cucumber around”. suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency.”Īlso, interesting fact, the verb “koken” which I accidentally typed incorrectly into Duden just now means “to make cocaine”. *The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, as quoted by Wikitionary, is “ a cognitive bias by which a recently learned word, concept, etc. You have to admit though, playing with candles is so much fun! Image credit: - benmillet ( ) – Subject to CC 2.0 License. Weird! Anyway, this word is used when, well, you kind of carelessly play with fire, such as when you play with a candle at a table in a restaurant by burning small bits of paper or something. This was one of those Baader-Meinhof phenomena* where I learnt the word online and that evening went for drinks and somebody used it straight away. The Germans aren’t all about serious stuff like extending contracts with no limit! I imagine this word is used a lot at Oktoberfest – when people are sitting at a table, can’t really move much because it’s so crammed, so they link arms and start swaying to the music.
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There aren’t many situations in which you can use this verb, but, if one does arise, the Germans are ready. The employer then extends said contract without any limit. What a mouthful that is in English! This verb is used when, for example, you have a contract with your employer for a 2-year period. To extend something for an indefinite period of time In fact, back in 2017 I wrote a similar blog post consisting mainly of German nouns (with the odd exception of ‘verschlimmbessern’ which I would have otherwise put into this post).Īnyway, here are some German verbs that you, more or less, cannot directly translate into English. A lot of these are nouns and you can find websites everywhere explaining them, so I thought I’d go in a different direction with verbs (that is, ‘doing words’).
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Well, that part is true, but what I have noticed over the years is that German also seems to have many words that are simply not literally translatable into English without having to use loads of words to describe exactly what’s going on. You may know German as the language with really long words.