Sorry for the you tube link, but it's too relevant: When people speak English but with German grammar.
this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2025
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Robot - Der Bipenböpenmann
It's >der< Bipenböpenmann, please. "Mann" is grammatically masculine, so all composite words of it are, too.
This is called the "Right Hand Head Rule"; that is, the rightmost member of a compound in languages like English and German (almost) always acts as the "head", the member that determines the grammatical information of the entire compound.
There are also many languages, such as Hebrew, with a Left Hand Head Rule, in which the leftmost member is the head. (Also Thai, as seen in a comment above!)
Zug and anzug however...
Zug is the noun to "ziehen". Like the Lokomotive pulls the wagons and "anziehen" is the German verb for "to dress" and in that case you can "interpret" again a "pull" (like in pullover) and the noun to "anziehen" is "Anzug".
But yes it typically makes at least some sense but sometimes it's pretty abstract or doesn't work very well.
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Slightly different thing cause this is agglutination but:
Ill/illik: fit/fits
Illet: concerns someone
Illeték: duty(kinda)
Illetéktelen: one without the duty, in english unauthorized(look at "staff only" for why "duty" makes sense)
Illetéktelenek: multiple unauthorized ones
Illetékteleneknek: for the multiple unauthorized ones
Then you can a use it in a sentence "Illetékteleneknek belépni tilos", "Forbidden for unauthorized ones to enter"
Wow what's the language?
Ahh yeah i kinda forgot to write that. Its hungarian tho this is kind of an extreme case. Most words youd use in a normal sentence has 1 to 3 suffixes.
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One of my favorite examples of this is when a coworker from Bosnia asked for some gloves. She knew more German than English, so she asked for handshoes.
German must have its own share of disappointing terms.
Pferd comes to mind as an example. I really expected something more metal like horzdraken or comical like hoofenstreider. But no, just a boring Roman loan word.
That's a common misconception! "Pferd" is called that, because it lives on the ground ("Erde"). If it would live in the air ("Luft"), it would be called "Pfluft".
/j
The latin word, for those who are curious, being paraverēdus (additional postal horse, postal horse for special occasions), according to https://www.dwds.de/wb/Pferd
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Not fair. Dutch does basicly the same. Yet we rarely get credit. German does sound cooler in most cases.
Every language is. German not having a word for fridge is fine. Compound words are a product of lack of a dedicated wird in a lot of languages.