Funny German words and street signs

Disclaimer: This blog post reflects my personal views on the German language, and if disagree with me that the German language is much more cacophonous than all Romance languages, I kindly invite you to reply, but only after reading my post in its entirety.

Last week, I spent a day driving through southern Austria with my father and some of his friends that live in Slovenia. The first Austrian city we visited was Graz, the second largest in this central European country. Considering this as my first real experience in a German-speaking country (I had previously only been in the Frankfurt am Main Airport), I was continuously amused by the language as a whole – whether it be the long, unpronounceable words, or the colorful signs indicating schools, fire stations, and other identifiable establishments.

I believe "schule" means "school". Just guessing.

Before last week, the only experience I had ever had with German was a quick lunch of a cream cheese pretzel (whose name I have already forgotten) and a putenschnitzelkracher (a breaded turkey sandwich). That name is the epitome of what seems to me to be the German pigritude in inserting spaces between their words, which whether right or wrong, is quite entertaining.

Personally, when I hear the German language, I seem to understand nothing but a loud cacophony of grunts and words with too many consonants jammed together. I always seem to think that they might be cursing at me, though this derives from my own ignorance of the language.

Anyhow, I enjoy poking fun at words I do not know, especially when I can repeat them in my Captain Von Trapp voice (which I am quite proud of). Every now and then I can sort of guess a word in German, which is especially necessary when trying to use the restrooms when the doors lack pictograms.

I cannot even begin to guess how this should be pronounced.

Does anybody have any idea what this means?

As you can see, I am very pleased that I speak languages that (at least in my mind) sound nice – mainly Spanish and Italian. I don’t know how many more “tsch” at the beginning of a word I would be able to handle.

For any of you that noticed, I used the word “pigritude”. I do realize that, according to just about any reliable authority on the English language, this word does not exist. Yet, I have “adopted” this word with www.savethewords.org and am therefore bound to use it.