Common Challanges for German Learners

The importance of capital letters in German The German language is almost the only language in which nouns, names and nominalisations are capitalised. This is why capitalisation is a challenge for most German learners, and even native speakers are sometimes unsure whether a word is written in upper or lower case. What is more, did you know that there are certain words that can be written both upper and lower case, but that the meaning of the sentence changes accordingly? This is exactly what this blog post is about. At the same time, this blog post will give you an [...]

Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz. This was officially the longest German word. The English translation is: Cattle marking and beef labelling supervision duties delegation law. It was part of a legal text, but since the law was repealed in 2013, it disappeared from the dictionaries. Nevertheless, the German language is known for its long words, also known as compound words. And this is also one of the (many) reasons why German is not an easy language to learn. In this blog series, I want to explain some common challenges for German Learners in more detail. And in this blog post, I will focus on [...]