What are your favorite German expressions and what do they mean?

 

Chris Ebbert

Knows German

My all-time favorite German expression is Schrottwichtel.

It literally means “scrap gnome”, and describes the kinds of awful things we stuff into closets or keep in garages for decades, because they were perhaps given to us with good intentions by someone at some stage, yet we can’t bear to look at them. Or we won them, or bought them while drunk.

Either way, this misery has sparked a whole new event in Germany’s more humorous corners, mostly North Rhine Westphalia, where I feel somewhat more at home than in the rest of the country, due to their whacky humour and creative use of the language. It’s called Schrottwichteln, simply turning the noun of Schrottwichtel into a verb by adding an “n”.

Typically, you’d do this at company dinners.

Everyone is expected to bring the most godawful thing they can find in their attic, something they are gagging to get rid of, and then they are being given to each other - the fun of it being that you are exchanging one monstrosity for a new one, lovingly prepared for you by a colleague.

I actually have two of them myself. They are hanging in my garage, and they are the kind of terribly tacky clocks made of injection moulded plastic designers less mentally robust than me may commit suicide over being seen with, or worse, being responsible for as designers.

Here they are. One was found in the garage attic when I had bought the house, the other somehow turned up together with various used items from a Loppis, a Swedish second hand market, probably as a sort of freebie.

Note that fir trees and roaring elks are a huge bonus for any Schrottwichtel. Whatever increases the corniness makes the Wichtel more Schrott.

As a German, can you name 5 things you love about your country?

 

Chris Ebbert

Updated 

1. The density of historic towns and cities. You are so heavily surrounded by history and old buildings in great shape, it can make your head spin. We don’t even look at a little chapel or old house when we drive past, but the same building would be a major attraction and featured in tourist guides in other places, like Canada or New Zealand, where buildings 500+ years old just don’t feature.
2. The beer. There are crazy many brands, and the best bit is that they are brewed according to the Purity Law from 1516. So, no funny stuff inside. When we try beers that were brewed elsewhere, we consider them more as a kind of “barley lemonade.” Real beer is chemical free.
3. The door handles and bathroom armatures. German handles are so much more solid, wobble-free, and satisfyingly weighted to operate. It is a joy to flush a German toilet.
4. How interesting the people are to talk to. There does not seem to be a single, boring German. Everyone is charged all the way with an intense sense of individual pursuits, and these tend to be big challenges—like reading the Mahabharata in the original, climbing Mount Everest, or finding one’s shamanic spirit guide animal.
5. The no-hype attitude. Germans like to keep it factual, and roll their eyes quickly at a very low threshold of overly flowery descriptions of anything. You are in the company of some very down-to-earth people, even while they may be holding forth on the descriptions of aircraft in the Mahabharata.

What are some famous German quotes?

 

Chris Ebbert

Senior Lecturer in Industrial Design, Mid Sweden University

55,995 followers

182 following

Industrial- and Transportation Designer, innovation professional, lecturer, researcher; lived here and there and done this and that. Harmless, unless there is food involved. I appear to have what I call chronic innovation disorder; show me what you will, I will have a better idea.

My one big passion in life is to uphold the flag of high civilisation. Smaller passions include cats of all sizes, American vintage cars, obtuse movies, photography, and musing randomly on social media.

My absolute favourite is by Wilhelm Busch: “Ist der Ruf erst ruiniert, lebt es sich ganz ungeniert.” Very freely translated as, “the upside of a ruined reputation is that life gets a lot more relaxed.”

Other favourites: “Komisch ist alles, was scheitert.” (Loriot). Perhaps best translated as “Failure is comical.”

“Wer nichts zu sagen hat, macht viele Worte.” (Heinz Erhardt). You could translate it as, “those who have nothing to say will use lots of words.”

Can Germans understand the speakers of the other Germanic languages?

 

Chris Ebbert

Senior Lecturer in Industrial Design, Mid Sweden University

55,555 followers

182 following

Industrial- and Transportation Designer, innovation professional, lecturer, researcher; lived here and there and done this and that. Harmless, unless there is food involved. I appear to have what I call chronic innovation disorder; show me what you will, I will have a better idea.

My one big passion in life is to uphold the flag of high civilisation. Smaller passions include cats of all sizes, American vintage cars, obtuse movies, photography, and musing randomly on social media.

As a speaker of High German, I would rank the extent to which the other Germanic languages are commonly understandable as follows:

• Dutch, 40%; to me, Dutch sounds a bit laboured, as if the speaker is trying to speak while also eating an entire mouthful of baked potatoes; but it is peppered with things that sound so clearly German every now and then that it makes me jump;
• English, 10%; English, when I first heard it, sounded very soft and curiously frog-like. The 10% overlap are more on paper than in spoken words, because the pronunciation is very different, except for things like house (= Haus), mouse (= Maus), etc;
• Swedish, 10%; here, a strange thing is going on; maybe it’s just me, but when I first heard and read Swedish, I was overwhelmed by how many words are actually identical with German ones, and what’s truly weird is: the ones that aren’t still make total sense to me. Like, skog (= Wald). I can not explain this, but there is something oddly intuitive even about Swedish words that have absolutely zilch similarity with German ones. It’s as if some kind of Germanic, ancient memory is revived or something; the way the language sounds though makes it hard for an unprepared German speaker to get it, because Swedes “sing” their words very melodiously, and that melody has nothing at all to do with the words themselves, so it sounds all like the Elves from the Lord of the Rings; 

• Norwegian, 10%; so similar to Swedish, I am sometimes unsure which of the two I am hearing; there is a curiously “uppity” quality to Norwegian that makes it sound like they are somehow making one extraordinary point after another;
• Danish, 10%; again, similar - but this time, entirely in written form, because the pronunciation is so soft and even slurred that it gets really hard to distinguish any recognisable features.