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 - vehicleAssistance 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.
Doch
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.
oh Christ, please. it really is just the lack of spaces that make them a nightmare.
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.
I once talked to a guy that was learning portuguese all by himself using Langenscheidt’s portuguese course.
They are pretty neat.
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.
Hanz! Get ze Hilfeleistungslöschgruppenfahrzeug!
Gesundheit.
Danke
My personal favorite is when Pieter cuts off a little girl’s hand:
The words are less impressively compound, but the images speak for themselves. This one is good too:
Great children’s literature!
Peter was the guy with the nasty hair and nails. The kid in orange is Konrad or little suck-a-thumb. His thumbs are cut of by the a random man with big sharp scissors because he wouldn’t stop sucking his thumbs. So he kind of had it coming. He was even warned by his mother.
But seriously the girl on the bottom is maybe the only good story I would actually tell my children. It’s about a girl who kept playing with fire even tho she was repeatedly told how dangerous it was.
There is also one story about a black kid that is being bullied for the colour his skin. A bystander doesn’t like that and dips the dipshits in ink so their skin is even darker than that of the black child. Wich is kind of slay but still portrays dark skin as worse than lighter skin soo :(
How does that story portray dark skin as worse than light? What am I missing? Just sounds like the dude showed the kids that even if you change the skin color, you’re still the same person.
Or do you mean because the white kids are bullying the black one and not vice-versa? Cause yeah… that might not be perfect nowadays, but it’s still just trying to teach the kids not to bully the immigrants just because they’re different. Guess they could’ve gone for something more neutral like some animals or something, but c’mon…
The comments the guy makes sound more like “yes having black skin is bad, but there is nothing he can change about it, so don’t bully him.” And when he dips the kids in ink he say “look at you. Your skin is even darker than his now!”.
How a normal Mexican American misunderstands via conversations with actual Germans…say you got an avocado… Now add salt, its a saltiavocado. Add vinegar, its a saltyvinegaravocado. Now step on it while running and you just “slippedonavinegaravocado” or you had an “avocadoslip”.
I call bullshit. Bullshit doesn’t come.
English has large compounds like this too, we just usually add spaces and/or hyphens so it doesn’t look quite as extreme when written out.
We tend to limit it to two words most of the time, and most compound words in English are Germanic in origin.
Well yeah I didn’t think about that but that’s usually true for the roots. The crazier ones I’m thinking of are with stacked prefixes/suffixes.
just separate the words
This, but seriously. If you know the words it’s trivial, and when you know a little German it’s much less confusing than it seems.
when you know a little German it’s much less confusing than it seems
speaking German is easy. Just know German!
I know it sounds silly, but my point is when you know the words, spaces are almost unnecessary.
German infamously has a lot of long compound words but for those who struggle with them I have a question (I’m curious and there’s no judgment here - I totally understand that it’s hard): Canyoureadthissentenceeventhoughtherearenospaces? What about Orangecatsittingonamat? If yes, is it difficult in German due to having a smaller vocabulary in a new language, or something else?
I think the biggest difficulty when starting out is that you don’t know common endings and syllable structure, and so it can be hard to parse where the morphological boundaries lie. It’s much easier once you understand those, though you will still find instances where two components are combined in an unintuitive (for the learner) way, particularly if the translation maps to a (apparently) indivisible root in the learner’s language.
That’s like saying you can read a sentence written in rot13. Technically yes, you can decipher it, but it’s not as easy. The spaces are used for a reason. Same with punctuation.
You know that trick where people can mostly recognise words with scrambled letters, as long as the first and last are right? Long, unknown words scramble that, and force you to parse them “manually”, and even then, in your own example, you can easily misread (and then have to go back and correct yourself) cANYou…, canYOUREad…, …ceEVENTho…, …venTHOUGHT-HEREar…, …ghTHE-REARen…,
Yes that’s a good example too! (I don’t know of any language where that’s a possibility but I agree it’s similar)
The spaces are used for a reason
That’s the thing though - my hypothesis is that it’s based on what one is familiar with. There are languages/scripts where spaces don’t indicate word boundaries (e.g. Chinese), or that are rather agglutinative (e.g. Finnish), or somewhere in between (like German), or on the opposite end of the spectrum you have Hindi/Devanagari where a space and an overline marks a word. Totally understandable that it feels perhaps rot13-ish due to unfamiliarity but I would be surprised if native users of those languages share that sentiment.
I think it’s funny that the capitalization of nouns in German is allegedly for readability, but at the same time we can cram the new testament into four words.
Keep in mind that the memes you see are extreme examples. The vast majority of compound words consists of 2 or 3 words. Like Ofenreiniger (oven cleaner) or Werkzeugkoffer (tool box). Werkzeug being a compound word itself, made from “Werk” & “Zeug” meaning craft or work & gadget. These extremely long words tend to describe very specific, often niche items and are just rarely used in common language. Most people would call the thing in the picture more generalised “Feuerwehrauto”. Sufficient to describe it for most people, but not as precise as the long compound. It is basically a question how much details you want or need to communicate.
Weeell I mean we use abbreviation for the really bad ones. BAföG being my usual example. And I work with international students so with some I see how they learn German from the beginning. My favourite moments are when they discover words like Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbesscheinigung (wich we abbreviate with AU or just Krankenschein), Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung (or just Tempolimit) or the aforementioned Berufsausbildungsförderungsgeld (or just BAföG). I feel like there are quite a few really long words in everyday life. You just have to look out for them.
Google translate says “the rescue firefighting group vehicle”
Come on, I know there’s Germans about. What the hell does it say lol? Here’s what Claude says:
The fire department’s rescue and firefighting group vehicle… It transports firefighters, ladders, tools, hoses… (text cuts off)
So I am guessing “Hilfeleistungslöschgruppenfahrzeug” is “rescue and firefighting group vehicle?”
Yes, these compount words might be the reason why we couldn’t get rid of the damn Nazis for good: After the Second World War, we Germans ourselves probably didn’t understand what the purpose of the “Entnazifizierungsbehörde” (authority to combat National Socialist ideology) was and, accordingly, could not really grasp why it was so important. A serious mistake that still has consequences to this day, unfortunately…
/s, obviously
I can read “help,” “groups,” and “drive” in the word, but I don’t know the others.
This is a satirical book right?
It’s German, so probably not.
For the longest time I believed Germany had no comedians, then someone told me that Mystery of the Druids was meant to be satire of English Police.
Then I was like “Okay that explains a lot.”
TIL that löschen is also used to mean extinguishing fires. Firefighter support vehicle, I guess? Or supporting firefighting vehicle?
Hilfeleistungs-Löschgruppen-Fahrzeug is a very odd composite word for Germans too. It’s not commonly used, this is probably "Amtsdeutsch“, a bureaucratic way of naming things as accurately as possible. Mostly used like that by government institutions and Microsoft help documents in german.
See also: Umschaltfeststelltaste (Caps Lock) und Gruppenrichtlinienbearbeitungsprogramm (Group policy Editor).
Shudders. This is why I (as a native German speaker) prefer english documentation.
I’ve played around with changing Windows system languages before and was indeed thrown off by the slew of Gruppenrichtlinienbearbeitungsprogramm-type calques. Glad to know that Germans also find this offputting ;)
When I was in school many notebooks came with a loose sheet to absorb the ink from our fountain pens. These are called “Löschpapier” (extinguishing paper).
A common joke was, to say you should toss the “Löschpapier” into a fire to extinguish it.
I tried it once. It burned quite well unfortunately.
LOL looks like a German advent calendar, not even a book!
Fake news!
It’s one of those books that lets you flap it open to reveal the Feuerwehrleute, Leitern, Werkzeuge and Schläuche within.
Ahhhh I was kinda wondering why there was an educational advent calendar 😅
