Where German actually slows you down

The panel above gets you reading German aloud correctly, and German rewards that more than most languages — its spelling hides very little. What it cannot prepare you for is the grammar, which is where German keeps its reputation honestly.

Every noun has a gender, and the little word in front of it keeps changing. Der, die and das are masculine, feminine and neuter, and the gender is often arbitrary — das Mädchen, the girl, is neuter, because every word ending in -chen is. Then the article shifts with the job the noun is doing: der Bahnhof becomes zum Bahnhof when you are going to it and am Bahnhof when you are waiting at it. You do not need any of this to be understood — wo ist Bahnhof? gets you there — but it explains why the same word reaches your ear wearing a different hat every time.

The verb goes to the end, and sometimes only half of it. In a plain statement it sits second, as in English. Use a past tense, or start with because or that, and the verb carrying the meaning is parked at the very end: Ich habe den Zug verpasst — I have the train missed. Many verbs split in two, and the front half goes last: ankommen, to arrive, becomes Der Zug kommt um acht an. For a listener that means you often cannot know what a sentence is about until its final word, station announcements included. Der Zug nach Köln fällt heute aus literally says the train to Cologne falls out today, and means it is cancelled. Learn fällt aus and Verspätung — delay — before you need them, because on German railways you will.

The false friends are friendly-looking and wrong. Gift is poison. Handy is a mobile phone. Chef is your boss — the cook is the Koch. Also means so or therefore, eventuell means possibly rather than eventually, aktuell means current, and Rat is advice, which is why the town hall is the Rathaus. The one that produces the best confusion is bekommen, which means to get: ich bekomme ein Schnitzel is a perfectly normal way to order, not a confession.

German sounds harsher in films than it does at a bakery counter

German has a reputation, earned mostly in war films, for being a language of barked consonants. Heard in a Munich café or across a Hamburg bakery counter it is nothing of the kind. What actually gives it its clipped, start-stop texture is a sound English has and never writes: the small catch in the throat in the middle of uh-oh. German puts that catch in front of every word that begins with a vowel, so ein Apfel is two separate pieces, never run together the way English turns an apple into a-napple. Copy that one habit — a clean stop before each vowel-initial word — and your German stops sounding like English in disguise.

The habit worth drilling is vowel length. German spells it for you. A doubled consonant after a vowel means the vowel is short: Bett, Mitte, kommen. An h after it, or a doubled vowel, means it is long: Bahn, ihr, Tee, Boot. And the length changes the word: Staat is a state and Stadt is a city, Miete is rent and Mitte is the middle. English speakers say everything at one medium length. Practise on the word you will read in every station — Bahn: the a of father, held a full beat, and the h silent.

Six things that catch visitors out

Water is a decision, not a default. Ask for Wasser and you will most likely get a bottle of sparkling, charged for. Still water is stilles Wasser or ohne Kohlensäure. Tap water, Leitungswasser, is excellent everywhere but is not brought to the table automatically, and some restaurants are not keen to serve it. The drink you will see on every table instead is Apfelschorle, apple juice cut with sparkling water.

The bill is split at the table, item by item. When you ask to pay, the server will ask zusammen oder getrennt? — together or separately? Say getrennt and each person tells the server what they had, and pays for exactly that, at the table, while the server works it out on a wallet of change. Nobody finds this awkward, and dividing the total evenly is the unusual option, not the normal one.

In a Bavarian beer garden you may bring your own food. In a traditional Biergarten, the bare wooden tables are yours to spread out a picnic on, as long as you buy your drinks there; the tables with tablecloths are for people ordering food from the kitchen. Service is mostly Selbstbedienung, self-service: you carry your own litre back from the counter and return the glass for its deposit.

A table with a sign on it is not free. A metal or wooden sign reading Stammtisch marks the regulars' table in a pub or village inn, kept for the same group on the same night every week, sometimes for decades. Sitting at it uninvited is a real breach. Ask ist hier frei? before taking any empty seat at a shared table — the answer is usually yes, and you are expected to ask.

Validate your ticket, because nobody checks it at a barrier. German city transport mostly runs on trust: there are no gates, and the check comes from plain-clothes inspectors who appear between stops and show a badge. A paper ticket that has not been stamped in the little machine on the platform or the tram — entwerten — counts as no ticket at all, and the fine is usually around sixty euros, payable on the spot, whatever your accent.

Knocking on the table is applause. At the end of a lecture, a speech or a good presentation, Germans often rap their knuckles on the table instead of clapping, and a group at a pub table may knock once by way of greeting when someone arrives or leaves. If the whole table suddenly knocks, nobody is impatient; something has just been approved of.

English is everywhere, and that is its own small problem

Germany sits near the top of every survey of English in continental Europe, and in the cities it shows. In a Berlin bar, a Frankfurt hotel or anywhere with people under forty, the moment your accent appears the conversation will switch to English — not as a verdict on your German, but out of efficiency and a genuine wish to help. If you would rather keep going, say so: Ich möchte mein Deutsch üben, I would like to practise my German, is received warmly, and most people will slow down for you rather than switch.

Where English thins out is predictable. Older people, small towns and villages, and much of the former East, where until 1990 the foreign language every schoolchild learned was Russian. And the official world everywhere: the pharmacy, the town hall, the notice taped to a door, and above all the railway announcement that your train is being replaced by a bus — Schienenersatzverkehr, one of the longest words you will be glad to recognise.

Germany also posts its rules, and expects them to be read. A handful of words do most of the work: Eingang and Ausgang, entrance and exit; Gleis, the platform; Abfahrt and Ankunft, departures and arrivals; geschlossen, closed; and Ruhetag, the one weekday a restaurant shuts, usually Monday or Tuesday and written on the door in small letters. Learning those ten words is worth more on a first trip than any amount of grammar.

Sie until invited, and the politeness hidden in small words

German draws a clearer line between formal and familiar than English has drawn for three hundred years. Sie is the default with any adult you have not been introduced to, and the move to du is an event rather than a drift: the older or more senior person offers it, sometimes with a raised glass, and from then on it is permanent. Starting on du uninvited with a shopkeeper twice your age reads as cheek. Waiting to be offered it is never wrong.

Names follow the same line. Adults are Herr Müller and Frau Schmidt — Frau for every adult woman, married or not; Fräulein is retired and now sounds condescending. A doctorate is part of a name on a letterbox and in a formal introduction, and Frau Doktor Weber is not a joke.

There are places where du is simply the default. Among people under about thirty, in hostels, sports clubs, a great many start-ups and most Berlin bars, nobody uses Sie with anybody. And above the treeline the line disappears altogether: hikers greet each other with du whatever their age, on the principle that on a mountain there is no Sie.

The real softening in German is in small words, not tone. Germans are direct, but the language carries its own cushions. Können Sie mir mal helfen? — that mal turns a demand into a quick, easy favour. Ich hätte gern ein Brötchen, literally I would gladly have a roll, is the standard way to order, and sounds far better than ich will, which is closer to I demand. Gern on its own is the warm reply to thank you, and bitte covers please, you're welcome, here you are and pardon? all at once.

Sixteen states, and a bread roll with five names

Germany has been a single country only since 1871, and before that its regions were kingdoms, duchies and free cities with their own courts and currencies. That shows. The sixteen states run their own schools and police, Bavaria calls itself a Free State, and a German will usually tell you which region they are from before they tell you they are German.

The greeting tells you where you are. Guten Tag works everywhere. In the north, from Hamburg to the coast, it is Moin, at any hour of the day — Moin moin if the speaker is feeling talkative. In Bavaria and the south it is Grüß Gott, and among friends Servus, which also means goodbye. Answering a shopkeeper in her own greeting lands well; Grüß Gott in a Hamburg fish shop marks you instantly as someone who learned their German in Munich.

Food words change at the state line. The humble bread roll is a Brötchen in most of the country, a Semmel in Bavaria, a Schrippe in Berlin, a Weckle in Swabia and a Rundstück in Hamburg. Order a Pfannkuchen in Berlin and you get a jam doughnut; order one in Munich and you get a pancake, because there the doughnut is a Krapfen and almost everywhere else it is a Berliner.

Under the standard language sit real dialects — Bavarian, Swabian, Saxon, the Low German of the north — some far enough from the textbook that Germans from elsewhere need subtitles for them on television. Everyone also speaks the standard, Hochdeutsch, and will switch to it for you. Beer carries the same loyalties: Cologne drinks Kölsch in small straight glasses and Düsseldorf, half an hour down the Rhine, drinks dark Altbier. Ordering one city's beer in the other is the quickest way to start a conversation, and not always a friendly one.

Germany, in sixty small pieces

Everything the card at the top of Start draws from — one a day, and here is the whole file. Read it on the plane.

• On the Rhine near Sankt Goarshausen, a slate rock called the Loreley squeezes the river into its narrowest, deepest bend and lent its name to a song about a siren on top.
• Saxon Switzerland is a forest of freestanding sandstone towers above the Elbe, spanned by the Bastei bridge, and German free climbing began on those rocks.
• Germany's first national park was declared in 1970 in the Bayerischer Wald, where whole valleys of spruce are now left entirely to themselves.
• Dresden's Stollen was once made without butter, because Advent was a fasting season. In 1491 the pope granted Saxony a dispensation known as the Butterbrief, and the loaf has been rich ever since.
• The Danube begins in Germany: two Black Forest streams, the Brigach and the Breg, meet at Donaueschingen, and the river runs east from there across the continent.
• At German universities students do not clap at the end of a lecture. They knock their knuckles on the desk, and a good talk ends in a rattle of wood.
• A Brezel owes its glossy mahogany crust to a quick dip in food-grade lye before baking; the alkaline bath, not the dough, is what gives the outside its distinct flavour.
• Bread here is catalogued: a national register of German bread types runs to well over a thousand entries, and the baking craft behind them is protected as cultural heritage.
• Helgoland stands alone far out in the North Sea, a block of red sandstone with a free-standing stack called Lange Anna, and it sits outside the customs area, so it is duty-free.
• Abendbrot means evening bread, and it is exactly that: supper is often uncooked, a board of bread, cheese, sliced sausage and pickles eaten at the end of the day.
• Climb the Brocken in the Harz on a misty morning and you may meet the Brocken spectre, your own shadow thrown huge onto the fog and ringed with coloured light.
• Torschlusspanik is gate-shut panic, named for the scramble to get inside a medieval town before the gates closed, and now used for the fear that life's chances are narrowing.
• Germany's official food code rules that a Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte has to contain Kirschwasser, a clear cherry spirit; without it the cake cannot carry the name.
• A mobile phone is a Handy in German — a word that looks English but is not one any English speaker would use for a phone.
• The mug your Glühwein comes in at a Christmas market carries a deposit: hand it back and you get the money, keep it and you have bought a souvenir.
• The Grimm brothers are remembered for fairy tales, but their life's work was a German dictionary begun in 1838; it reached the letter Z only in 1961, long after their deaths.
• Sunday is legally quiet: shops stay shut and Ruhezeit rules bar drilling, mowing and loud music, so the cities empty out into parks and cafés instead.
• White asparagus gets a season of its own, Spargelzeit, and tradition closes it on 24 June so the plants have the rest of the summer to build up strength.
• German builds words by stacking them: a glove is a Handschuh, a hand-shoe, and a thimble is a Fingerhut, a finger-hat.
• German has a letter no other language uses, ß, called Eszett or scharfes S. It stands for a sharp s sound and never begins a word.
• Every New Year's Eve, German television shows Dinner for One, a black-and-white English comedy sketch that Germans can quote line for line and Britain barely knows.
• Schrebergärten are rented allotment plots in tidy colonies at the edge of town, each with its own little hut, and the associations that run them have rules about everything.
• The MP3 was developed at the Fraunhofer Institute in Erlangen, where researchers tuned the compression against Suzanne Vega's Tom's Diner until the voice finally sounded right.
• Wild boar live inside Berlin's city limits, rooting through parks and gardens after dark, and the city employs hunters to keep the sounders out of the busiest districts.
• Fernweh is far-sickness, the ache to be somewhere distant. It is built as the exact mirror of Heimweh, homesickness, and German treats both as the same kind of ailment.
• Place names say what places were. München grew up by the monks, and any town ending in -furt, like Frankfurt, stood where a river could be crossed on foot.
• Karneval has rival battle cries, Alaaf in Cologne and Helau in Mainz and Düsseldorf, and the wildest day of it is Rosenmontag, the Monday before Lent.
• The Zugspitze rises to 2,962 metres on the Austrian border, and a cog railway and a cable car carry you to within steps of the golden cross on its summit.
• Gummibärchen were invented in Bonn by Hans Riegel, whose company name, Haribo, is simply the first two letters of Hans Riegel Bonn.
• Frankfurt drinks Apfelwein, a tart apple wine poured from a blue-grey stoneware jug called a Bembel into a ribbed glass whose facets keep a greasy hand from slipping.
• Rügen's Königsstuhl is a wall of white chalk dropping straight into the Baltic, and Caspar David Friedrich painted those cliffs into a national image.
• The Bauhaus school opened in Weimar in 1919 under Walter Gropius, and its idea that a chair, a teapot and a building follow the same rules still shapes design.
• Heidelberg's university was founded in 1386 and has been teaching ever since, which makes it the oldest university in Germany.
• Aspirin was registered as a trademark by Bayer in 1899, and the name nods to Spiraea, the meadowsweet plant from which a related compound had been drawn.
• Old volcanoes in the Eifel left round crater lakes that locals call Maare, and geologists adopted the dialect word, so every maar on Earth is named after that corner of Germany.
• A tune stuck in your head is an Ohrwurm in German, an ear-worm, and English did not invent a word for it — it simply translated the German one.
• In 1888 Bertha Benz took her husband's motor car without telling him and drove 106 kilometres to Pforzheim with her two sons, proving to the public that the machine worked.
• About a third of Germany is covered in forest, and a general right of access means those woods may be walked through freely, whoever owns them.
• Oktoberfest mostly happens in September. It began in 1810 as a public party for a royal wedding, and the dates were shifted forward later to catch warmer weather.
• German children start school with a Schultüte, a huge decorated paper cone filled with sweets and pencils, and every first-day photograph has one in it.
• East Germany's pedestrian signals had a stout little man in a hat, the Ampelmännchen, and he was kept on afterwards; he still walks and stands at crossings in Berlin.
• Gemütlichkeit covers warmth, ease and good company all at once. A room, an evening and a mood can each be gemütlich, and no single English word manages the same job.
• Sylt has no road bridge. Cars reach the island by being loaded onto a train that crosses the Hindenburgdamm causeway over the tidal flats.
• Tired of grounds in her cup, Melitta Bentz punched holes in a brass pot, lined it with her son's blotting paper and patented the coffee filter in Dresden in 1908.
• Along the Mosel, vineyards climb slate so steep that some rows are worked by winch, and the dark stone stores the day's heat to keep Riesling ripening after sunset.
• English had no single word for pleasure taken in someone else's misfortune, so it borrowed the German one: Schadenfreude, from Schaden, damage, and Freude, joy.
• Currywurst, sliced sausage under a curried tomato sauce, was mixed up in Berlin in 1949 by Herta Heuwer, and it is still eaten standing at a kiosk with a small wooden fork.
• Karl Drais rolled out his Laufmaschine in Mannheim in 1817, a two-wheeled wooden frame pushed along by foot. No pedals, no chain, but the ancestor of every bicycle.
• Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays in Würzburg in 1895 and made the first radiograph of a human hand; in German the rays still carry his name, Röntgenstrahlen.
• The word kindergarten was coined by Friedrich Fröbel in 1840 for his school in Bad Blankenburg; he meant a garden where children grow, and the word travelled the world untranslated.
• Bavaria's Reinheitsgebot of 1516 permitted brewers only water, barley and hops. Yeast joined the list centuries later, once anyone knew it was there.
• In the Wadden Sea off the North Sea coast lie the Halligen, tiny unwalled marsh islands where houses sit on man-made mounds and winter storms flood the grass around them.
• Feierabend translates as celebration evening and means the moment the working day ends. Wishing someone a schönen Feierabend is wishing them a good rest of the day.
• In Swabia the Kehrwoche is a rotating duty: each household in a building takes its turn sweeping the stairs and the pavement outside, and the rota is often written into the tenancy agreement.
• Borussia Dortmund's south stand is one enormous standing terrace known as the Yellow Wall; German football kept standing tickets when most other leagues did away with them.
• Every noun is capitalised in German, not just names, so der Hund, das Haus and die Freiheit all take a capital and a page of German text looks studded with them.
• The Advent calendar started in 19th-century Germany as chalk marks and paper pictures counting off the days to Christmas, long before anyone thought to hide chocolate inside.
• Kaffee und Kuchen, coffee and cake in the middle of the afternoon, counts as a proper meal, and on Sundays it is the reason a whole family sits down together.
• Johannes Gutenberg built his movable-type press in Mainz around 1450, casting each letter in metal so a page could be assembled, printed, then taken apart and reused.
• Wishing someone a happy birthday before the day itself is held to bring bad luck, so Germans will politely refuse the greeting and make you wait until midnight.