Can you spell that, please?

Today in class we worked on the three Rs. Arithmetic? Yes, we did math problems in German class. The teacher would say something like "590 plus 210" and whoevers turn it was would answer "800." The point was to practice recognizing and saying German numbers, but the addition and subtraction part was a little tricky.

In any event, it reminded me about something I mentioned in an earlier post about the German language -- the proficient use compound words. Rather than using a space or hyphen, the German language often strings words together into a single word. For example, numbers are written as one word. In English, you would write 362 as three hundred sixty-two. But in German, you write dreihundertzweiundsechzig.

But it's not just numbers. If you're my age or older, you probably remember the VW ads from the late 80s with the slogan Fahrvergnügen -- or driving pleasure. Sometimes the compound words can become quite long. A Fernsprecherteilnehmerverzeichnis is a telephone list of participants. And a Verbesserungsvorschlagsversammlung is a meeting for improvement suggestions. If you google "long German words" you'll find all sorts of examples.

I'm not sure that these words are actually used, but it's still kind of fun to see how many words can be strung together to create a new, quite-concise word.