Greedy for description
I love the German word neugierig, curious, which is made up of the words neu, new, and gierig, greedy, literally meaning 'greedy for the new'.
Sent by: Katie
Comments
Just for fun!!
The German translation of "my TV screen is broken" is not what you might think... "
I fell in love with the word "sprachgewandt" = silver-tongued, but literally language-smart. Another nice word is mole in German "Maulwurf" literally mouth pitch.
My favourite German word has to be
Has anyone noticed how much easier it is to speak a foreign language when you have had a few drinks? I learnt what the Army called 'colloquial' German whilst based in Germany in the 70's. I left Germany in 77 and the next time I was over there was in 94 and I found after a few drinks the language came flooding back, probably as any embarrassment disappears. My sister-in-law is German and always says 'I am going to the willage', replacing the v with a w, which always makes me laugh, but she follows up by saying how much German can I speak compared to the amount of English that she can speak. She has, when home in Germany, been complimented on her German in the shops etc and has to tell them she actually is German.
I really like the the word Andenken. Because as a verb it means "to think of someone/something" but as a noun it means souvenir. I just think that's pretty clever. :)
The Geiz in Ehrgeiz doesn't refer to stinginess - rather, it's an older meaning of Geiz that would be more accurately translated as greed. So someone's who's ehrgeizig is literally honour-greedy.
I have always liked the word Dudelsackspieler, many of you will know it means bag-pipe player.
The best is the word for the contraceptive pill - die Antibabypille, now no one would get confused if we had labelling like that in England!
@NixSouvenir " in German. It's just a matter of personal feelings. When I hear "Andenken ", I rather do NOT think of "Reiseandenken ", but ... you guessed it ... something valuable someone left behind who passed away. "Ein Andenken an meine Oma " normally means that she passed and I want to keep her in loving memory.
Well, I use "
Flag this comment