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10 cards from across every topic, each citing a source. Tap one to open it in the feed.
- 'Actual' isn't 'aktuell' – but Spanish 'actual' is.
English 'actual' means real, not current. Spanish 'actual', like German 'aktuell', means current; 'actualmente' means …
- English imported 'Schadenfreude' because it had no word of its own.
English uses dozens of German words unchanged: Schadenfreude, Wanderlust, Zeitgeist, kitsch, doppelgänger, angst …
- How 'pater' became 'father': Grimm's law.
Jacob Grimm, yes, the fairy-tale Grimm, described a rule in 1822: on the way into Germanic, p became f, t became th, k …
- How to guess German articles right most of the time.
Look at the ending. Always feminine: -ung, -heit, -keit, -schaft, -tät (die Zeitung, die Qualität), almost always -ion …
- No English speaker understands the German 'Handy'.
'Handy' is a pseudo-anglicism: it sounds English, but English never used it for a mobile phone. Brits say mobile …
- The 63-letter word a law deleted in 2013.
'Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz' (beef labelling supervision duties delegation law) …
- The German letter that wasn't allowed a capital until 2017.
The ß emerged in the Middle Ages as a fusion of long s and z. No German word starts with it, so there was no capital …
- The German word Americans say every school day.
Friedrich Fröbel opened the first 'Kindergarten' in Bad Blankenburg in 1840: children should be tended like plants and …
- Why 'Gift' is deadly in German but lovely in English.
Both words share the same Germanic root meaning 'to give'. In German, Gift originally meant a present too, you can …
- Why 'das Mädchen' (the girl) is grammatically neuter.
Grammatical gender in German is about word form, not biology. All diminutives ending in -chen and -lein are neuter: das …