“Don’t be such a plague!”: A Selection of German False Friends for English Speakers

I wrote about false friends way back when in a post in 2016. You can read up on it here. In that post, I went over some basic words you might hear in Germany, such as Handy (mobile phone) and Gift (poison). Seen as I haven't wrote a language post in a while, I thought I'd write…

Funny Things Brits Say in German

A few years ago I wrote a blog post about some of the best and funniest things I've heard Germans say in English. You can read them here if you want: Funny Things Germans Say In English. To be fair, I make my fair share of mistakes in German too - the general ones I…

German Idioms Using Body Parts

I could write pages and pages about German idioms that I learn. There are so many wonderful words and phrases out there. Then again, that's the same for any language - English included, of course. But because of this, I always find it difficult to narrow down idioms for blog posts. Mostly I just go…

“Kokeln” and “herumgurken”: German Verbs with no English Translation

You may know German as the language with really long words. Well, that part is true, but what I have noticed over the years is that German also seems to have many words that are simply not literally translatable into English without having to use loads of words to describe exactly what's going on. A…

“Humid” or “gay”?: How one little ‘ü’ can completely change the meaning of a word

I still have a few problems with German. I still get genders of words wrong. I keep stumbling over weird and wonderful idioms I've never heard of before. And there are still words I struggle to say with a decent accent ("angerufen" is one of them... that bloody 'r'!). But there is one particular thing I…

“To make an elephant out of a mosquito”: German Idioms Part V

It's time for another German Idioms post, after having collected quite a few good ones over the past few months. I've filtered down to some of the best ones, and will perhaps use the rest for another post some time. Enjoy these fun German idioms! etwas in petto haben Literally: "to have something in petto" Translation:…

Mistakes I still make in German

I have technically been learning German now for 14 years (woah). But, I will never be able to master the German language. Punkt. I can sometimes feel on cloud nine, breezing through a conversation, when BOOM I say the wrong gender for a word or a use the wrong type of word, mistaking verbs and…

New German Words

I've technically now being learning German for 14 years, which, sitting back and thinking about it, is a hell of a long time. It's over half my life, let's put it like that! But it's safe to say I still make my mistakes and I still learn new words. Here's a sample of new words…

8 of my favourite Spanish words

As I mentioned in my previous post, I attend a Spanish class. I started properly learning Spanish back in my last year of university in 2013 and have ever since (bar a few months when I first moved to Frankfurt) been attending weekly classes. This has led me to somehow be attending a course at…

7 Useful German Words that English doesn’t have

We all know German does nice, big, long words. Sometimes those words don't actually exist in English, in that there's no way to translate a German word into one English word - often you have to say a whole English sentence just to translate one German word. Over the years I've noticed there are words…