Top 10 words we should steal from German

Wanderlust, Schadenfreude, Doppelgänger, Zeitgeist. English speakers have occasionally turned to German to help fill gaps in our language. German just has this way of expressing in one word what would normally take us, I don't know, three. But these ones are just the tip of the iceberg of what dear old Deutsch has to offer. So let's dive below the surface. Here are my top 10 untranslatable German words Let's go. So first on my list at number 10 is the shortest and the sweetest. It's Jein. So you know the German for yes is ja and the German for no is nein. Well if you smoosh them together you get jein. And it means exactly what it sounds like. A mix between yes and no. It is the perfect word for when you could go either way. Like would you like another of these salt-filled cheese-covered pretzels? Jein. They are delicious but I'd also like to not have a heart attack in my 30s. It's a yes but also a no. I feel like it also kind of reflects this like middle-of-the-road attitude that a lot of Germans have. That's my pal Marie, a real-life German. She's going to help me explain a few of For me it would be if somebody would ask me are you looking forward to your next work week? I'd go jein. There are things that will be fun but there is also stuff I'm not excited about. The word was popularized in the 1990s by Hamburg hip-hop outfit Vetersbrot and their somewhat humorous song Jein. In it a guy is faced with a series of dilemmas such as whether or not he should cheat on his girlfriend who's gone on holiday without him. When he gets a tempting offer from another woman he says... The reason Jein is only at number 10 on this list is that we might be better off coming up with our own yes-no hybrid. I mean Swedish has done and I bet there are others. So how about No, that's already taken. What do you think? Is that one any good? At number nine, the next German word that I think we should slot into the English language is kummerspeck. Now we can actually break this one down into two parts. Kummer meaning sorrow or grief and speck meaning bacon. Kummerspeck is that little bit of extra timber you may have taken on when you've turned to good lady gluttony for solace. This is the result of comfort eating basically. Exactly. So I would say probably the most common example is if somebody just went through a breakup or through another sad event in their life and then they gain a little bit of weight because they maybe spend more time in bed, more time and then they usually once they reappear into society We've all done it, right? I mean who can honestly say that they've never sought solace in the bottom of a tub of Ben and Jerry's? But how exactly do you explain your temporarily inflated state? No English word is going to cut it. That's why we need a helping of German grief bacon. We need the word kummerspeck. Up next at number eight it's backpfeifengesicht. The German language is great for helping us describe some of the darker feelings that all humans experience at one time or another. The word schadenfreude is such a gift because who hasn't taken pleasure in someone else's misfortune even if the English lexicon likes to pretend that we haven't. Backpfeifengesicht is another word that isn't nice but speaks to something that we have all experienced. We've all encountered someone with a backpfeifengesicht. That is a face that's just asking for a slap. You would say, oh der hat so ein backpfeifengesicht. He has such a backpfeifengesicht. He has such a slappable face. As German band Die Erzter melodically put it essentially kind of means that you have an irritating appearance or that you're ugly. It's not a kind word. Backpfeife is a slap to the cheek and gesicht is just face. There's also another word orpheigengesicht. Orpheigen is, you know, to box someone's ears. Backpfeifengesicht expresses in one word something that it would take English, I don't know, two or three. It's not higher up on the list though because, well one, I'm not sure now's a great time to be introducing new insults to the English language. And two, it takes a fair bit of practice to get right but once you've got it, it is enormously satisfying. Backpfeifengesicht. Number seven is a rather more positive potential import into English. It's sprachgefühl. Sprachgefühl literally means language feeling but its meaning as a whole is a little harder to express but maybe that's because I myself do not have sprachgefühl. Sprachgefühl is the intuitive ability to know the right words to say. Someone with sprachgefühl always reaches for the perfect term or ideal idiom in any situation. I think in English we would maybe say that someone has a way with words or they are erudite or eloquent but sprachgefühl is more versatile than those words because you can also have a sprachgefühl for a foreign language. I think we would perhaps call it having a feel for the language. If you just kind of have a knack for it du hast ein gutes sprachgefühl entwickelt. You developed a good sprachgefühl for it. This word actually already has some currency in English but you only find it in very high brow usage. I'd like to see all of us get a little bit of sprachgefühl. Now if you want to develop your own sprachgefühl for a foreign language may I heartily recommend to you Babbel who sponsored this video. 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Babbel has a variety of different subscriptions including a lifetime one and you can get 60% off during Babbel's Black Friday sale using my special link in the description. There's a 20-day money back guarantee too so you know what are we waiting for? Vamos! Okay back to our exploration of untranslatable German and to our number six Sturmfrei. It breaks down into the words for storm and free and it expresses the unique state of freedom that comes with being left alone in the house. Being able to do as you please without the usual storm of consequences. The best example would be if you're a teenager and your parents are out of town you would have Sturmfrei but it works for adults too. Like for example I could write my friend hey ich hab grad Sturmfrei which would mean hey there's no one else here come over we can party. Ein sturmfreier Bude I've also heard right which is like a a free house. By the way German also has these two words specifically for when your partner, wife or husband temporarily isn't around. They translate into straw widow and straw widower. Again we're talking about situations that we've all been in at one time or another but that English is currently ill-equipped to describe. That's why Sturmfrei has stormed its way onto my list of German words that we should steal. Okay we're into the top five. At number fünf I give you Schnapsidee. Now we can simply translate this as Schnapsidee with reference to Germany's hard liquor of choice and it describes something that seemed like a good idea when you were drunk but less so in the cold light of day. If somebody says das war eine Schnapsidee it usually means it didn't work out. Would they be saying that it was literally an idea they had when they were drunk or could it be a bit like saying it was kind of it was a pipe dream it was never gonna work out. I got carried away. Exactly it means I got carried away. Schnapsidee isn't the only handy German term that comes served with a shot. There's also the doubly excellent word Schnapszahl meaning Schnaps number. A Schnapszahl is a number like 11 or 33 or 55 one that gives you the impression that you're seeing double. How big a part of German culture is Schnaps? It's huge so you'll have a Schnaps while you're playing cards with your friends or you'll have a Schnaps after after dinner and when I have a stomach ache my grandmother will be like here's a shot of Schnaps. While we're talking German Tipple I simply have to introduce you to one of my favorite German words of all time. Wegbier. You could translate it as way beer perhaps and it's the bottle of beer you buy perhaps in one of Germany's famous late shops to drink on your way somewhere else. Usually somewhere where you intend to drink even more of them. One of the best things about this country is that you can drink in the street and no one has a go at you. It's one of the few things they don't have a go at you for. Anyway Marie any more boozy terms we could borrow? One more important one related to beer is called Konterbier so counter beer and essentially it's a beer to counter your hangover. It's the beer that you drink the next day after a heavy night of drinking when you're very hungover and you need a remedy. So you have a small beer and that's your Konterbier to counter your hangover. Fight fire with fire. That is perfect yeah we have the phrase the hair of the dog that bit you which I think is a reference to an old rabies cure and what's the best hair of the dog that you can get? It's an extra little beer little Konterbier. Just a little one. Now I'm a little worried that all this talk of alcohol has knocked us a little bit off course so let's get back to our top 10 German words that English should steal. In at number four it's Kopfkino. Now this literally means head cinema and it is all about the power of your imagination. The theatre of the mind is something that you do occasionally here in English. Right but that's basically what this is right it's how things play out in your head. Exactly so it usually will be used if you're for example having a conversation with someone and they say something that evokes pretty vivid images for you mentally so if my friend says oh I'm going to the Maldives tomorrow I'll be like oh Kopfkino because I'll be like imagining her in the Maldives or imagining me in the Maldives and I'll have this very vivid movie almost running through my mind. Kopfkino expresses something simply beyond the word imagination. That's why German has both and I think we should too. That's why it's at number four. I just want to take a moment here to discuss why German is apparently so good at coining the right term for the right moment. Well if you look back at the words we've discussed so far a lot of them have something in common. They're essentially just compounds made up of two or three other German nouns that have been attached to one another like train carriages and this is what German speakers down the centuries have been most likely to do when they've needed a new term for something. Whereas in English we've tended to look beyond our own language when we've needed a new word we've either built a new one from Latin or Greek or borrowed one from another language. When the television came along we named it using this unwieldy mix of Latin and Greek whereas in German it was named using existing German terms. By the way television and Fernseher mean exactly the same thing. It'd be as if we'd called the TV the Farseer. But there hasn't always been this difference in approaches between English and German. Old English, the language as it was being spoken up until around a thousand years ago, also built up words by slamming together other ones. A person's body was their bone house and there's this beautiful old English word Uchtkehre which meant dawn care or dawn sorrow. It's the angst that you get as you're lying in bed at night, a sensation that certainly did not die out with the Anglo-Saxons. In fact maybe that's one word that we should also start using too. My point is changes in the way that English works mean we've lost the ability to elegantly build up words in the way that German does and that's why in the cases that I've mentioned we need German's help. Okay let's get back to it. We're into the top three and at number three it is Fernweh. So you know homesickness? Well this is the precise opposite. Fern means far like it does in Fernseher and weh is sort of soreness. Fernweh is a yearning for faraway lands. If I haven't taken a vacation in a long time then I'll start feeling really fanvy and start looking at Google Street View of Algeria or Spain or wherever. But actually it reminds me of another German word that we already have taken into our language because I think this is the closest word to it in English and that's people in English might pronounce it wanderlust but the need to sort of get out there is what wanderlust is, right? Yeah in German it's love of hiking. I guess it's love of exploring. So I would use wanderlust pretty literally if I'm going on a big hiking trip. Not just on your regular Sunday afternoon walk but on a significant hiking trip. But fanvy is something tied to a long journey of a big vacation. So I wonder if maybe it'd be worth us substituting out wanderlust and replacing it with fanvy because actually fanvy kind of fits our definition of wanderlust a bit better than even wanderlust does. We should try to establish that, yeah. The campaign starts now. So German actually has heimweh, homesickness, and fanvy, awaysickness, if you like. I suppose we could just start saying awaysickness ourselves but I recommend we take the rather more succinct fanvy and add it to the English lexicon. Just looking for an excuse to travel anyway. Okay we're up at the business end now. The top two and my number two German word that I think we should steal is zugzwang. Zugzwang is used in those moments where circumstances have conspired to leave you with no choice but to act. When you're forced into taking a decision you are in zugzwang. The term actually comes from chess where zug means move and zwang is force or compulsion. It's a point in the game where you are forced to make a particular move even if it's going to harm your chances of winning the game. It's an enormously useful term that has rightly found usage well beyond the game of kings. For example if somebody really has to make a decision because it's it's the last minute then you would say oh he's forced to act. That is such a good word. I think this is one of the best examples we've got because we experience people being in that position every day or we find ourselves in that position maybe every day and we don't have a word for it. I think society would really benefit from having that term because it describes a human condition human situation pretty well and it helps maybe understand other people's actions better. Quite right. I realise that we have gotten a little bit deep here but anything that helps us to better relate to one another and comprehend each other's motivations is a good thing in my book. That's why zugzwang is a worthy runner-up. Okay now it's time. The number one word that I think English should steal at the earliest possible opportunity. It's the word that fills every hard-working Helga or Heinrich's heart with a glee that until now we've had to live without. Ladies and gentlemen I give you feierabend. So you know that bit of the day that you probably look forward to most that bit after you finish work and before you go to bed. What do you call it? Well let me stop you there because you don't call it anything because we don't have a word for it but German does and it is feierabend. Feierabend is the post-work evening but it's much more beautiful than that because it means basically it's cause for celebration. Indeed feierabend literally means celebration evening. It's a cause to celebrate every working day of the week and who doesn't need that? Admittedly the people you see blankly staring into middle distance on the train on the commute home don't appear to be in a particularly celebratory mood but that's maybe because they haven't picked up their Wegbier on the way and I'm also not sure what this says about how much Germans enjoy their jobs but usually the end of the day working in a German office comes with a chorus of schönen feierabend, schönen feierabend, have a great feierabend and I think we deserve that too. That's why feierabend is top of my list of German words that I think English should steal. So which was your favourite? Let me know in the comments. There are also plenty more where these came from by the way Treppenwitz, Honigkuchenpferd, Sitzpinkler which is probably worth a whole video in itself. I'd welcome your suggestions for others. Next check out my video about how to read German without actually being able to speak it or this really cool one that I just did all about dinosaurs and I'll see you over there. Right, feierabend!