German Sayings, Expressions, Proverbs & One-Liners Part I

Here begins my occasional series on German Sayings, inspired by a recent post on a German language podcast blog. I'll devote another entry to reviewing that blog but what's important now is how she closed the latest post: "everything has an end, only sausage has two! :-)"

Even better in German:

Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei! :-)

Such encapsulated wit & wisdom is a fun and entertaining way to learn the language, and I'm driven to learn more and more German proverbs, let's begin:

Juni kalt und nass, lässt leer Scheune und Fass

So I had to look up half the words on Leo.org and I still don't get it. "June cold and wet" then what lässt means is beyond me. The word leer could mean anything, I'm gonna go with "windy", after that Scheune means "barn" and Fass means "barrel" so "...barn and barrel". Off to a pretty shaky start. All I know is it's a Bauernregeln which means "country proverb" and it's about the weather. So is this one:

Hat der Berg ein' Hut, wird das Wetter gut. Trägt er einen Degen, gibt es einen Regen

Easy. "If the mountain has a hut, the weather will be good. If it's got a sword, there will be rain". That makes absolutely no sense. On the upside, I knew practically all the words. But then the word I had to look up, Degen (which means "sword") is effectively the wrench in the works.

I've about had it with German expressions, more later and in the meantime tons of German proverbs here.

UPDATE: I'm now translating German sayings on a regular basis. Browse the constantly growing list below to find German sayings and their English translations, and follow me as I stumble through the process of translation. Sometimes I fail. That's where you come in and correct me. Or read the comments of people who correct me. It's great fun. So what are you waiting for? Click on any of the German sayings below!

A German saying about the sunrise.

Translate German Words Online with New WordReference.com in German

I begin this post with a confession: German is not my only love. Before German came Spanish.

It was Spanish that taught me about WordReference.com, an online dictionary that has frequently been an indispensable Web resource to me when professionally translating text from Spanish to English.

WR is also my go-to resource to satisfy any sort of vague curiosity about Spanish. So when I decided to really set my mind to learning German, I felt a bit lost without WordReference because at that point (like two months ago) they simply didn't do German.

Times have changed.

Not sure exactly when, but less than two months ago they up and rolled out an online German dictionary! If they'd only been an itsy bit quicker to the draw (like by about two months, or less) I probably would never have gone over to their formidable competitor in the German space, Leo.org.

It's for the better, though, because now I have two great online German dictionaries which do translations and forum discussions about translating words from German to English and from English to German.

What's the difference between Leo.org and WordReference in German? From my limited knowledge, here's a quick comparison between WordReference German vs Leo.org for English-German, German-English:

An immediate deduction (not observation, I haven't had time yet) is that the forum discussions in WR won't bear as much fruit as Leo, because WR in fresh out of the gate for German. Duh. But while we're talking about online language forums, the quality of WR's for Spanish was always exceptional in my experience, and while I don't know French and never go into the French section I am a good friend of the second-ever mod for WR for French and he's a bright guy so I get a sense that WR, in general, does bitching forums. Can't comment on Leo simply because I haven't been in there yet. But from what I can tell their online German-English, English-German dictionary is awesome, perhaps even better than WR was for Spanish.

Have you had a chance to use either one of these online tools? If so, what are your thoughts on the dictionaries and forums? Can you compare the two?

The 11 Healthiest Words in German

I translated Well's 11 healthiest food recommendations and turned it into a shopping list (pictured) theoretically fit for any Austrian or German supermarket.

It's actually two lists. First, I did as much as I could with the Berlitz German Compact Dictionary that I'd picked up in the London airport. That's the first list.

The second list reflects what I couldn't find in Berlitz and so went to Leo.ORG, a helpful online German-English dictionary, to translate the rest. Now I easily could have done the whole list with Leo, but I wanted to see how far Berlitz would take me. Hopefully this will give you a slight idea of what it's like to live by Berlitz, and decide for yourself if you want to consider buying it.

It's up to you, but if I could do it over I'd pass on the Berlitz and invest in a better German dictionary. But until I find one I'll rely on Leo it's free, and maybe take Berlitz with me when I go shopping but up to now the idea hasn't been appealing.

Oh and one more thing: when looking up these words I didn't always pay attention to each word's gender (der, die and das) because at this point I've been employing an improvised pidgin of German mixed with English curse words which is surprisingly effective. Where I'm at right now, trying to approximate coherent German grammar isn't even a specter on the horizon yet.

Let's start with the Berlitz dictionary's list of English words and their meaning in German:

beets - Runkelübe or Rote Bete "red beets"
cabbage - Kohl
cinnamon - Zimt
(pomegranate) juice - Saft
dried plums - trocken "dried", Pflaume "plums" (i didn't look up "prunes")
pumpkin seeds - Kürbis "pumpkin", Samen "seeds"
sardines - Sardine
frozen blueberries - eiskalt or gefroren "frozen"*, Heidelbeere "blueberries"
grater - Reibe**

*i asked the cashier and she had yet a different word for "frozen" but I forget what it was
**okay this wasn't on the list but you can take a great to plenty of the foods

Now here's the Leo list:

Swiss chard - der Mangold (has got to be healthy)
pomegranate (juice) - Granatapfel
turmeric - die Gelbwurz or die Kurkuma

Not bad, Berlitz. You only missed like two and a half from the list. Still, I gotta say pomegranate is the coolest because the German word reveals the biblical origins, in high school I learned that the apple in the Garden of Eden was a pomegranate, according to some scholars, so it's interesting that it's Granatapfel because Apfel means "apple" in German.

So anyway basically I got annoyed/bored/tired as usual halfway through the shopping experience but made off with a few of the items. One uniquely Austrian health food is the pumpkin seed oil, it's pitch green and they sell it bottled like olive oil. I've heard it's very hard to find in the US. It's got amazing health properties and I bought the oil instead of the seeds which incidentally also were available but pomegranate juice wasn't, although apple juice was.

Here's to your Health.