A German Saying About The Weather, Translated

This year, the weather has been strange. Time for another German saying about the weather. Let's see if I can translate this. If not, hopefully our Austrian transplant Ramsey or our native Swiss friend Roman can help us out :-)

Here's we go:

Geht die Sonne feurig auf, folgen Wind und Regen drauf

Okay, I'm closing my eyes and not going to the German-English translator Leo.org for help. Here's my first take. I think this is a very, very simple expression about how when the sun is fiery, the wind folds under and the rain stops.

Now, let's see how close I am. First, I'm going to look up the words I'm not sure about:

geht...auf, well, I told you that I already studied German. So I know enough about German's separable prefixes to save time and look up the single word aufgehen:

aufgehen - to rise. Well, that makes sense :-)

feurig - I was right! It means "fiery" in German! Sweet.

folgen - to ensue, to follow.

drauf - to be on the ball

or it could be a shortened version of darauf:

darauf - upon

Hm. Upon the ball? The ball being the "fiery sun"? Ouch. I'm confused about drauf.

Let's try it anyway. How about something like, "If the sun rises brightly, it will be followed by wind and rain". (Here in Austria, truer words have never been spoken). I think we're good to go. And now I'm also way less confused about drauf. It's short for darauf and one of the infinite definitions of darauf generated by Leo.org was "afterward".

This was a pretty good German sayings sesh. If you want more, visit our master page of German sayings. Enjoy!

German Word for Juice: Apple, Orange, Lemonade & Tea

I recently blogged the German words for healthy foods. Now let's focus not only on the German word for juice, which is Saft, but on what seems to be a specialty at the market here in Klagenfurt, Austria:

Orange-Karottensaft

Can you guess what that means? Fresh squeezed and grated, it's delicious.

The German names of other typical juices are:

der Apfelsaft - apple juice
der Orangensaft - orange juice
die Limonade - lemonade
der Eistee - iced tea
die Saftbar - juice bar

As you might have guessed, the sometimes-sweltering Austrian August has made me thirsty. Speaking of which, hears another near-cognate:

der Durst - thirst

Have another juice you love? List it in the comments below!

Listen: German Language Radio Stations Online

Since I'm located in Austria and wouldn't mind better training my ear to the local dialect, I found a few Internet radio stations broadcast in the German language. I hardly understand spoken German, so it's a test of patience, but here's a list of German language radio stations from Austria.

I recommend Ö1 Inforadio. Lots of talk injected right into your brain if you believe learning a language is in part a process of osmosis. If I'm not mistaken it's the standard Ö1 that often plays classical music or fuzzy recordings of church music that has it's certain charm but mostly just not that stimulating. And besides, it's usually just instrumental so where's the language learning?

Click here to stream 24-hour non-stop Austrian German talk.

What Online German Translator Do You Use?

I recently compared a couple online German translators, dictionaries, language forums. What is your experience with these online tools? Are there other programs out there on the Web that compare to these two?