I can read “help,” “groups,” and “drive” in the word, but I don’t know the others.
Hilfe – help
Leistung – action (closest translation for this context)
-s- to make it sound less awkward
Lösch – root of the verb “extinguish”
Gruppe – group
-n- to make it sound less awkward (Gruppen being the plural, is incidental)
fahr – root of the verb “drive” or “go” in the context of vehicles Zeug – basically “thing”; hence Fahrzeug = vehicleIt’s no coincidence that two of the words I recognized are cognates in English. “Fahr” I knew because I was always amused by the phrase “Gute Fahrt!”
EDIT: I just realized there are still remnants of “fahr” cognates in English, such as in “wayfarer.”
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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
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.
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.
Say you got a pen … Now add apple, it’s a applepen. Say you got a pen … Now add pineapple, you got pineapplepen.
That’s going to be in my head for a while. Bastard.
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.
Meanwhile there is many words that are just two words in english instead of a compound word.
Lets take a typical example for “business” compound-words:
IT-Sicherheitsdienstleister -> IT security service provider.
I don’t know about German, but in Swedish it looks really messy if you sunder your compound words. In general I think people know what you mean regardless, but you can end up with peculiar double meanings. There are plenty of signs, notes, and what have you that people have posted online for a laugh.
Off the top of my head
- Gå lättpackad i fjällen
- Travel lightly (as in luggage) in the mountains
- Gå lätt packad i fjällen
- Travel slightly intoxicated in the mountains
- Sjukgymnast
- Physiotherapist
- Sjuk gymnast
- Diseased/Sick gymnast
- Addendum. Sjuk could also be used as an emphasizer just like in English. Think “bro that’s a sick outfit” kind of thing, so it could be read as “awesome gymnast”
- Årets sista svenskodlade tulpaner
- The last Swedish-grown tulips of the year
- Årets sista svensk odlade tulpaner
- The last Swede of the year cultivated tulips
It’s also worth noting that the tones can be different, so if you “hear” the words as you read them, then “lättpackad” and “lätt packad” sounds different.
That’s very interesting that sick/sjuk have the same slang meaning, thanks.
Yeah! I wonder if it’s because of the prevalence of English media here in Sweden. We unlike the Germans don’t really do much dubbing unless the target audience is children/families.
- Gå lättpackad i fjällen
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!”.
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 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.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear about that being a tongue in cheek remark.
It’s that German humor.
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 learnt to write after hearing in Grundschule. It doesn’t work that well.
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.
So we have this verb and the ending in third person plural is -ent but we just dont pronounce that so it pronounces the same way as third person singular…
Fucking French. ‘we’re never, ever going to say this ‘h’ character, but you still need it to spell words correctly because fuck you, that’s why.’
English isn’t exactly innocent there. See knight, plumber, mnemonic, pterodactyl.
Well those are words descendent from Latin and Greek.
Yeah but the spelling ‘normally’ would have been updated to match English pronunciation. That’s what happens in most languages. As I understand there were two issues:
- Some dictionary writers (ca. late 1400s IIRC) wanted spellings that seemed fancier like French and Latin, which is why e.g. the silent B in debt was added ‘artificially’.
- The printing press was invented right in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift so old spellings got “locked in” even though spoken English continued to change significantly for a long time afterward.
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.
Another example of a false friend:
German: Bekommen (to get), English: Become (werden)
Hence a joke I often heard while learning English:
Guest: “I become a steak.”
Waiter: “Well, I do hope you won’t, but I could ask the chef, if you insist…”
Whilst quite a lot of words are pretty much the same in both languages, “wie” in Dutch means “who” whilst in German it means “how”.
Having learned Dutch first, I can tell you that when I was first learning German the expression “Wie geht’s” tended to give me a serious mental hiccup when I was trying to talk to German people.
Tja
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.
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
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
No idea, I don’t speak German. I just studied it a bit and barely remember a few basic phrases.
Imagine you want to set a buildinh on fire but you dont want to risk being the first suspect. So you call 911 instead of the fire department equivalent and use the long word to lose time
I haven’t tried, but I feel like that concept would be easy for me to grasp because I already find myself doing it with English if I happen to know the old words, Latin or otherwise, used to construct the modern ones.
Hahahaha German makes words like I do in conlangs except it somehow never became unique words with time
Hanz! Get ze Hilfeleistungslöschgruppenfahrzeug!
We make these huge, clunky compound words so that we can introduce new abbreviations. That’s a HLF.
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Very useful for when he’s done getting the Flammenwerfer
Die post ist pissenwasser!
The mail is pissing-water?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.🤷
It also makes it annoyingly difficult to talk about other people without people making assumptions about their gender because of an imbalance of male, female and neutral terms in one’s language.
Also why can’t employees times be qeer? o.o
English is the weird one of the Indo European languages in dropping grammatical gender. Or if you look at it from Persians perspective, we don’t go far enough because we still have gendered pronouns.
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.
Gesundheit.
Danke
Ah fuck that’s one long mess of several words put together…
Let’s see…
What the fuck does lösch do in that word???
Hilfe (help or assistance)
Leistung (act, performance or service)
Lösch (delete, remove, extinguish)
Fahrzeug (vehicle)
Hilfeleistungloschgruppenfahrze, or Extinguishment help service vehicle
wait this isn’t just a shitpost THIS IS REAL???
Yes. German is a Lego-block language. The example in the image is extreme, but there are lots of “combination” words like that.
For example, glove is Handschuh, which means hand-shoe. A shoe for your hand.
I used to work in a plant with a lot of people from Bosnia. One of them said when she first started working there her English was limited, but she knew the German word for “glove” and asked for some “hand shoes.”
Can schadenfreude be broken up like this?
Schaden = damage
Freude = joy
Thanks.
Interesting how that doesn’t seem to fit, to me, with how I’ve heard its meaning described as “Pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others”.
No one in their right mind would put this word into a children’s book though, it’s absolutely not colloquial. So I suspect sometijng weird going on in the original image.
I’ve seen long compound words in children’s book recently. Could be real.
Some kids get hyper fixated on cool stuff like firefighters, cars, dinosaurs,… and love learning new words in that topic even or especially if they are complicated.
Sometimes those little brains can do a lot more than many give them credit for.
Fuck I missed gruppen, is just group, autocorrect added it
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 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.
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.
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?”
The other commenters have already explained it diligently, but I wanted to hop on for something related.
As a German speaker, it actually irritates me a little, that English doesn’t agglutinate. Let’s take the word “gum ball machine”.
Which is it? It’s a machine. So are “gum” and “ball” descriptors of “machine”? Well no, they’re all nouns. But they’re not all subjects or objects of a sentence. They’re one subject together. But they’re not written together.
If I had a red gum ball machine, is it a red machine made out of gum that produces balls? Ok, it can also be spelt gumball machine. But that’s still multiple words per concept.
I like my nouns to be one word if it’s one thing and one subject.
“Gumball” is the only correct spelling; “gum ball” is incorrect. So the gum and ball are at least connected. But you’re right about “red gumball machine.” The gumballs or machine might be what’s red.
American here who studied German for eight years, graduated with a minor in German, and lived there for one year:
I’m not sure how to properly translate this children’s book.
The long word breaks into easily-understood pieces:
“help-ability-extinguish-group-travel-thing”
But in order to get a proper concept back out of it you need to know what order the pieces go together in and I don’t know that.
travel-thing is a vehicle.
help-ability is emergency services
Beyond that I have to guess — Is group-travel-thing a crew vehicle, making this a crew vehicle for extinguishing?
Or maybe extinguish-group is a fire crew and this is a vehicle for fire crews?
Either way I feel like the author is using a lot more word-parts than they should have to for what is (clearly in the picture) better described as a pump truck.
I had to look it up, it’s the technical term for a certain firefighting vehicle.
In particular, what distinguishes it from a normal crew firefighting vehicle (Löschgruppenfahrzeug) is its equipment for “Technische Hilfeleistung” (technical help-providing) which basically means it carries equipment beyond basic extinguishing agents. If you’re physically stuck in your car after a crash, a Hilfeleistungslöschgruppenfahrzeug has to arrive to cut open the doors.
A Hilfeleistungslöschgruppenfahrzeug
A (small) Löschgruppenfahrzeug. Note that it only contains firefighting equipment.
No, that’s actually the official term for a very specific type of vehicle. It’s a hybrid between a Löschgruppenfahrzeug (a multipurpose firefighting vehicle) and a Rüstwagen (which carries equipment for light non-firefighting purposes).
People who actually deal with them just say “HLF”.
Gut Wehr!
Full disclosure to avoid claiming false valor: I’m not a firefighter; my girlfriend used to work for a special purpose vehicle company.
Any reason you didn’t stay in Germany?
It was a study-abroad year and the year ended. I never had the permission to stay and work.
Do you think you would have given the opportunity?
At the time, no. It wasn’t in my plans at all. Now I think about it sometimes.
Yeah, I’ve been considering it myself lol
Its more like “assistance for firefighting group vehicle”.
Probably a "supporting firefighter group vehicle“ to be exact.
Edit: this word is kind of bizarre, because it is a composition of 3 compound words which each are compound words themselves.
Hilfe-leistung (Help Giving = Support) Lösch-Gruppe (Extinguishing Group = Firefighters) Fahr-zeug (Drive Thing = Vehicle)
Yeah, that’s even better. Translating these kind of words is quite hard.
Google translate says “the rescue firefighting group vehicle”
