It probably comes one or two drinks before the Schnapsidee! 7. It refers to that warm feeling of pure joy and ease that you get when you’re enjoying a drink in great company. Moist joy might not sound all that appealing, but this is a highly specific word that doesn’t have a literal translation in English. ‘Fröhlich’ means happiness or joy, while ‘Feucht’ means wet or – sorry – moist. If you clocked that ‘fröhlich’ looks suspiciously similar to the English word ‘frolic’, then you’re already better at the German language than you think. Constant coffee-breakers need not apply! 6. To have Sitzfleisch means that you’re able to sit and work productively for long periods of time. Instead, it’s a compliment most often found in the workplace. This faintly queaze-inducing term doesn’t just refer to your posterior, though. This is one of those German words that looks and sounds so close to its English meaning that you might think it’s a red herring.īut no, Sitzfleisch really does mean ‘sit flesh’ or, quite unappealingly, ‘seat meat’. Frische Fische fischt Fischers Fritze.’ 5. Here’s one that’ll ensure you nail the sometimes-tricky German ‘r’: ‘ Fischers Fritze fischt frische Fische. Committing a few to memory can actually help you get more comfortable with learning new words and speaking at speed. You can actually find them in every language. The tongue twister – or, literally, ‘tongue breaker’ – isn’t just a curio of the English language. ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers’ and ‘she sells seashells by the seashore’ – have we unlocked a school memory yet? This has become such a common phrase in everyday parlance that you can use it to describe any questionable idea – even those that don’t originate in a barrel. Ill-advised in the groggy-headed aftermath? Almost always. It refers to those brainwaves we have when we’re a few steins down.
This is a word that means exactly what you might suspect it does – its closest literal translation is ‘Schnapps idea’, or booze idea. In fact, your decision to learn German might even have been one. We’ve all found ourselves in the clutches of a Schnapsidee from time to time. Probably one that’s best left off your Tinder bio! 3. Put them together and you get a useful little descriptive word with an English meaning that means ‘a face in need of a slap.’ A slap face! If you deconstruct it, you get Backpfeife – a slap – and Gesicht, which means face.
The German language is liberally peppered with lengthy compound nouns that describe oddly specific situations and feelings. It’s the German equivalent of calling someone a wuss or a wimp, but like many of the language’s slang terms, it’s curiously food-related. Our first funny German word, Weichei, might seem like an innocuous choice at first glance.Īfter all, its literal English translation is soft egg, and breakfast food isn’t exactly peak humor.īut this word is commonly used idiomatically by native speakers to refer to someone whose personality resembles, well, a soft egg. If you want to learn German at ease and with joy, try out my courses here. Here are 18 funny German words and phrases to help you on your ongoing journey to fluency in the German language.
Learning more of these colloquial funny words makes it a lot easier to chat to other German speakers – and a lot more fun, too. Take, for example, ‘wanderlust’ and ‘doppelgänger.’ In fact, Germans have such a knack for creating words that perfectly describe certain feelings and situations that we’ve even adopted some of them into the English dialect. Instead, it’s the dizzying array of highly literal and incredibly specific nouns and adjectives. Many find plenty to laugh at in their militant tones and often incomprehensible length, especially compared to other languages.īut once you start to break it down, you’ll find that the real humor isn’t in how German looks or sounds. Fun German words are the frequent target of ire from language learners.