Close relative, long homework
One of English's nearest living relatives, and still thirty-six weeks of work, because the vocabulary is free and the grammar is not.
The language that builds nouns like machines: Handschuh, the hand shoe, is a glove. A hundred million speakers, and the grammar is an engineering course that ends. Europe's largest economy, free universities that teach in it, and Rilke, Kafka and Nietzsche exactly as they wrote: precision as a lifestyle.
VALD-ayn-zam-kite
The particular calm of being alone in a forest
German builds a word by welding two together. Forest plus solitude, and the result is a feeling nobody else bothered to name.
Romantic poets used it so much it became a national mood.
FERN-vay
Homesickness for a place you have never been
The exact opposite of Heimweh, homesickness. Same suffix, opposite direction.
It says the ache of distance is the same ache as the ache of home.
TOR-shloos-pah-nik
The panic that the gate is closing on your life
From medieval city gates shutting at dusk.
Now it means the fear of running out of time to do the things you were supposed to do.
ZAYN-zookht
Longing for something unnameable and possibly unreachable.
The German ache for something you cannot name: a place you have never been, a life running parallel to yours. C. S. Lewis built half his theology on it and still could not translate it.
VELT-shmerts
The sadness of knowing the world cannot be what it should be.
World-pain: the weariness that comes from comparing the world as it is with the world as it should be. Coined for Romantic poets, worn daily by anyone who reads the news.
IN-er-likh-kite
A life lived facing inward.
The German cultivation of the inner life as a homeland: music, thought and feeling as a country no occupier can enter. Where a nation went when its outer history was unbearable.
FY-er-ah-bent
The end of the working day, treated as a place you arrive at
celebration evening
English has clocking off, which describes a machine. German has an evening that begins with a celebration in its name.
You can wish someone a good one, defend yours, and be told you are disturbing it.
ge-BOR-gen-hite
The safety of being held by a place or by people, with nothing left to guard against
German has one word for safety as a fact, Sicherheit, and this one for safety as a feeling.
It is the back seat of the car at night when you are small, the kitchen with the light left on.
Not the absence of danger. The absence of the need to watch for it.
FING-er-shpit-sen-ge-fool
The tact to handle a delicate situation exactly right, felt rather than reasoned
fingertip feeling
Borrowed by people who work in diplomacy and by almost nobody else, which is a waste.
The image is exact: the information arrives through the fingertips, before the head has a case ready.
Where German parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.
Reading about a language is not speaking it. These are the places I would go to find someone to speak German with.
The German Passepartout is not out yet
Five printed pages that carry you through the arrival. Leave your address and you hear about it first, and nothing else.
Leaving takes one click.
Short stories written inside a measured vocabulary, with the word lists and nothing invented for a textbook.